why

Every so often I tend to check myself. You know, question why it is that I have this compulsive love of words. I truly love them. I love the shapes of letters and I love how they look on the page, on a keyboard, on a chalkboard. I adore how they fan out and lift one at a time to strike the paper over the roller on an old typewriter. I love how they parade across a computer screen, one at a time, as I touch the keys. I love to read them, left to right, top to bottom between the covers of a book. I love the way words sound all on their own, or in careful, or even careless combinations. I love them. And I love to write them...much more than I love to say them.

I think it's only natural to want to write when you love to read. When you love letters and words and sentences and paragraphs...and stories. But there is more to it than that. And every so often I check myself as to why.

I have written about this very thing countless times in different ways here in the nest. But this time I am thinking more about why I love to read...and the answer to that is quintessentially why I need to write.

I love to read, I NEED to read, because it is a way to see how things work out. Life is a never-ending roller coaster ride of uncertainties. All stories, whether fiction or factual, are like a guidebook to almost every life situation, every uncertainty imaginable. It's all been lived before, folks. Like all the beautiful emails I have received from women who have walked the breast cancer road...I read those wise and generous words absolutely hungry for the wisdom of the journeys already taken and how it all turns out. Stories, good, true stories, make you CARE about how things all turn out. They make you want to find out how things end up. And that is what writing does, too.

Writing is a way to journey through something, on my own, for writing is always a solitary endeavor, to at least ATTEMPT to explain in words the things that I cannot sometimes even begin to explain to myself any other way. And I can make things up, things that may not have anything to do with my own uncertainties, and I can try to follow them through to their endings and maybe in that magical way that stories have, maybe I will sometimes find even a glimmer of truth in my own story. And another thing, perhaps the most important thing, is that when I am writing the world seems to fall away and the only thing that matters is the inexplicable mystery of putting letters down on the page, one after the other. It can be the highest form of bliss I know. Because...the visceral and even the physical act of writing is its own reward. Not the story at its end, not even the sharing of it, or the publishing of it, or hearing it read aloud...it's the very moment of doing it. Over and over again I can enter a space where the letters form words and the words make sentences and the sentences grow into paragraphs...

An escape? Yes. And the sanest way I have to attempt to understand. The act of writing is its own reward. And if I am very lucky, I'll have a story to share.

Comments

[misty]

you are a beautiful writer! i feel the same way about painting that you do about writing and reading. what a gift to have this "thing" that allows us to loose and find ourselves again and again.
much love. xoxoox

[Relyn]

OH! You captured it. You captured my passion for words perfectly. May I quote you?