Why Do You Write?

I’m in it for the buzz

Recently I was working through some knots in a story I’d written over 15 years ago. I’d been wrestling with this story for weeks after having abandoned it for years. As I was teasing through the things that didn’t work and got down to the final couple of paragraphs….it happened.

Somewhere a miraculous link, three perfect words, floated into the next to last paragraph that solved everything and made such perfect sense. It was as if those particular three words were ordained to be there.

And I’ve been high ever since. I floated. I was filled with a sense of well-being and I still get a little giddy every time I re-read that paragraph.

That’s it right there. Why I write. The buzz.

I still remember my first hit of that intoxication. I was writing a short story called “The Black Pigeon” for my writing course at Case Western Reserve University. It was the final of the four stories we were assigned to write that semester and the one I’d written before it had been awful. It was about a woman dying of breast cancer and I wept writing the atrocious and lame last page. It got annihilated in workshop and I was sure I’d fail the course.

The course was taught by PEN/Hemingway finalist, Steven Lattimore, who said that it seemed like I’d tried to distance myself from the protagonist to stay safe and that’s why the story sucked. He said my next story would probably be my break-out story. He was right.

“The Black Pigeon” has some autobiographical elements but it was one particular image that kept echoing for me: a large flock of circling pigeons with a hawk gliding above it. And as I was blindly feeling my way towards some kind of ending that image was there and when I wrote that last sentence ( “Her target was arcing around to arrive exactly where she’d be in eight seconds.”) I got serious chills up my spine, down my arms and out to the ends of my fingers.

Man, I was high for a week after that. Hooked and hooked good.

Now let’s be clear: If you’re publishing your work on Medium you’re not in this for the money. Even if you’re one of these machines who publish multiple times daily, the monetary remuneration for your time is laughable. There’s something else going on and it’s powerful.

Until Medium came along and swept me off my feet that story has only been read by a handful of friends. It’s never been published. It has been rejected numerous times. And here’s the magic of it all; that buzz isn’t dependent on publication, accolades, cash or prizes. When we have that miraculous moment it’s enough in and of itself. I’ll never stop chasing this buzz.

Show of hands…who has been told more than once that they were wasting their time writing, especially writing fiction (because, come on, everyone knows fiction is dead, right?). That they’d have a better chance of being hit by lightning twice with a winning lottery ticket in their hand than of actually making a living as a writer. That they should be realistic.

Ok, here’s how realistic I am prepared to be. I’ll get a day job I don’t hate and I’ll show up every damned day and do a good job. I’ll pay my bills and my taxes. I’ll make the bed and do the dishes and eat my vegetables. And I will keep making shit up; whole worlds of people who have never existed and never will.

But I’m not kidding when I say that I write because I can’t not write.

In 1928 Virginia Woolf in the guise of Orlando’s nameless narrator noted that: “Anyone moderately familiar with the rigors of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the field of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.” (1)

For decades I have been vacillated between genius and fool and only now, thanks to Medium, do I have readers. What a miracle!

But you know and I know that I’d still be writing regardless.

So now…tell me why you write. I am fascinated and can’t wait to hear this.

© Remington Write 2019. All Rights Reserved

(1)

Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Penname publication

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