Why I Write

It's been a long time since I wrote a post like this.

I've always admired writers, their ability to transport you to other times and places. I feel like I'm writing for a new audience here on Blurt, but those who know me also know the story of my childhood and how reading was my refuge.

I came to writing quite by accident, it was in adult education, my only experience with the educational system. Since childhood I've read practically everything I could get my hands on; that was my education, along with listening to people a lot smarter than me. In adult ed there was a class in Literature and one of the stories was by Jack London, a fine author but one that I never enjoyed reading. I went to the teacher in frustration and begged to replace the story -- To Light a Fire -- with one of my own chosing. I was reading a collection by Franz Kafka at the time and asked to do one on him.

No matter how hard I tried I couldn't convince the teacher to let me off the hook. "What is it about London you dislike?" She asked. It was then that I put my foot in my mouth. "He sucks," I replied. "I write better than him." An obvious lie, but I had already stuck my neck out and was about to have it chopped off.

"Oh, you write?" She asked. "I tell you what. You bring in some of your work and then we'll talk about reading London."

Well, I had done it. Of course I had nothing to bring in, so I dug out my wife's old Corona typewriter and spent half the night cranking out three stories. I don't think they were very good, I don't even remember what they were about. After reading them she said: "These are really good, do you mind if I send them to my friend at Central (Central Michigan University)?"

"Go ahead," I said thinking it would get me out of reading London. It didn't work, I had to read it anyway, but I did get a letter from her prodessor friend encouraging me to enroll at Central, which I did.

In college I was exposed to academic writing, make a point, back it up, and do it again and again. I liked it, it appealed to my sense of organization, and it turned out that it was pretty good at it. By the end of my freshman year I was making pretty good money writing masters theses. I got published in an academic journal my sophomore year, a paper I wrote on NAFTA that I presented at three or four acamemic conferences. But, my first love is writing fiction.

One of the things I like best about writing fiction is that it allows me to participate in the lives of other people, even if they only exist in my head. As Robert Heinlein so eloquently pointed out: writing is a very lonely profession. It's funny, now that I'm reaching the twilight of my years things that never affected me before are starting to give me pause to think about them now. Other people have pictures of their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. I can't eben recall what my mother looked like. Several months ago I had a flashback of when I was five, when she took me upstairs to the bathroom, filled the tub, climbed in and slit her wrists. I can recall in vivid detail things about that bathroom that I had forgotten (pushed aside?) decades ago. I remember the faces of people I killed in Vietnam, they haunt me almost every night. I once wrote that I write to excise my demons; it now seems that I write to exercise them. I write because I've always felt alone, even around other people. Writing is my connection to the human race. I've always felt like more of an observer than a participant and writing gives my life context.

Over the past couple of years I feel like I've stopped writing and started reporting. I feel like the information I'm passing along is important. People need to be made aware that we're in real danger of losing what few freedoms we have left to a brutal, dictatorial globalist tyranny. I'll continue to report, but I really want to get back to writing. I've been thinking of resurrecting a few of my old stories like The Lottery Council and improving them. I hope that the new audience at Blurt enjoys them as much as I do writing them.