Why write?

My wife likes to make a few extra dollars reselling things on kijiji or the local facebook group.  I can’t remember if we were picking something up or dropping something off to someone but we drove to their house in Kentville and the woman whom with my wife was in contact said her husband works from home so he will be there.  The house was quite nice, or at least nicer than ours and its always fun to covet someone else’s stuff.  I was curious what this guy did and what he would be like working from home.  Was he going to be some stuffy business type in a suit and on a conference call?  When he opened the door he was dressed in his pajamas and looked like he had just rolled out of bed.  We did a pleasant exchange and when I got back to the car I told my wife, “I’m going to get serious about being a writer starting right now.”

Not that I want to be lazy and stay in bed all day but the idea of not having to drive into an office moves me almost as much as the idea of getting all of my wonderful ideas out of my head and developing them further.  I never found out what the guy did do for a living and he may have been getting ready to put on a suit but its the opportunity to do things at your own pace that makes it fun to think about.  I have highly productive times and very low productive times and they don’t seem to run the same on any given day.  I want to be able to be anywhere in the world doing whatever I want and be hit by an inspirational idea and write it down.  If I don’t have the ability to fully flesh it out I’d just write the general idea and as more ideas came to me I’d throw them in briefly until I had the opportunity to sit and really give them life.

I like to think the life of a writer or artist is just going along and when something hits you then you stop and seize the moment and write while the electricity is in your fingers.  I know that’s not necessarily true, as much as I’d like the ability to do that.  Romanticizing it and thinking of myself traveling through mountains or valleys and having something come to me so perfect I pull over on the side of the road and write for an hour to squeeze every ounce from the idea.  I know I’ll have to actually plan time to write and those flashes of ideas will have to be captured to play with later but the ability to be in that position is what I’m after.

I also used to wish I could extend a movie beyond the ending.  I would think how much fun it would be to have another act, or twenty acts to a good story to see where the characters went.  I wanted to write something and keep the characters I loved alive forever.  I wouldn’t have to give them up at the end of a story, or tv show or movie.  If they were my characters I could take them wherever I wanted to until the end of time.  I’m sure authors do tire of writing certain characters after a while but I can imagine becoming so attached to someone you created and developed that you would want them to live forever.  That idea stayed with me in so many things I did growing up that its a very strong part of why I want to write.

I loved playing RPGs because the story took your characters through big changes and it wasn’t simply a one dimensional person from start to finish.  I always loved playing sports games that had a dynasty feature and my favorite part is the draft because of the idea that you can take a player at the very start of their career and follow them through their biggest accomplishments until they retire.  There may be some underlying psychological thing there too where I want to hold onto something forever because I’ve never had anything last long enough to truly care about when I was little.  We moved twice when I was young and everyone who lived where we finally ended up had already known each other for a long time and were good friends, so I was kind of the outsider.  I don’t have anyone, aside from my immediate family, who knew me when I was young and that I could still be friends with.  I don’t have any real connection to anything from when I was young.  But what better reason to want to do something than to recapture your youth.

I used to write when I was in elementary school too.  I remember writing a story about knights and dragons.  As a senior in high school we all had to have a major project and mine was to write a novel (we won’t mention that I never even really started it not to mention finished it).  When I was coming to finally decide on what I wanted to do for a career and pick my college and classes based on that my first inclination was to be a writer and take english classes.  I never did because it just didn’t seem realistic, unfortunately, but the idea of me wanting to be a writer was never something I came up with in the last five years because I wanted a distraction.  I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life I just didn’t realize it until recently.

Although I think the basis for my wanting to write comes from my drive to be creative.  I’ve never been good at drawing but I admired a classmate of mine who was.  He was incredible and loved that he could bring to life anything he could imagine, and I wished I had that ability.  I tried to draw but I was very, very bad and I think from that my need to write really developed.  I love to make up stories and song lyrics.  It might be quite stupid but I like to replace the lyrics to songs on the radio as they play with my own.  I try my best to keep up to the song but usually only make it 10-20 seconds but its still fun.  I’ve mentioned that I like to come up with various ideas.  I want to create entire worlds with intricate backgrounds and take them through ups and downs.  I want to create and never stop.

 

You can make anything by writing.

C.S. Lewis