Some of you, most of you, probably are somewhat aware that, for a hobby I perform this archaic task which was once referred to as "writing". To write is to place a graphite stick or dye-filled tube to paper and, using said material, draw small symbols onto bleached and pressed dried wood pulp. If you do this for long enough and with a certain pattern, you get what are called words. These words are used to form sentences; the sentences paragraphs, and the paragraphs essays or chapters. The things you are reading right now are also words, though they are on a computer screen. This passage up until this point has taken me around four minutes to write. If I were to have written it out, it would have taken perhaps ten minutes.
Now that I've cleared up what writing is, for those of you who may have forgotten, or in some cases never learned, allow me to explain, as the title promises, WHY I write. That is, why for the past eight years, I have made writing my main and most-practiced hobby. Why writing instead of football or underwater basket weaving.
The first story I actually sat down to write and said "OK, I'm going to write a story." was about the immediate and long-term effects of nuclear war. In retrospect, it was only about fifteen lines long and not very well-written but there was a very clear message that was essentially "If we keep fighting and something like this happens, many people will die and those that don't die will suffer a fate worse than death." If I do say so myself, pretty deep stuff for an 11 year old who, up to that point had never written anything outside of history essays and short little nothing-bits in English classes (more on those in a bit.)
My grandmother was a writer and my #1 influence. That is, my father's mother. She had written a fictionalized depiction of her childhood in Mississippi in the 1930s and 40s. To this day, I regretfully must say that I haven't read it in its entirety, though I did help name one of the chapters. It was my grandmother with whom I sat, watching her read and learning to articulate my words into beautifully crafted sentences. When I wrote my first story, the one about the nuclear war, she was the only one who really batted an eye. She saw something in my writing that no one else saw. She actively encouraged me to continue writing. I did so and went on to write a set of humorous stories about an anthropomorphic rhinoceros in the autumn of 2003. These rhino stories as they were dubbed, became an instant hit with my grandmother and her book club. From her friends in the book club, I received even more encouragement to continue writing. Around that same time, I received a writing tablet from a friend of my grandmother's. I set to filling it with stories and ideas. It became evident that, since I had nothing better to do, I may as well write. Surely I had a computer at the time. I had video games I could have been playing. I could have been outside tossing a ball with friends, but instead, I was inside writing. Often, I was writing for my grandmother, so that she could read over and comment on what I had written. Reason 1, I write to become a better writer.
When I was in third grade, there were two times in which I recall having to write short stories. They were of course nothing in scale compared to the 80-something combined pages of two stories I would go on to write later down the line, but they were my shadowy beginnings. The first story was about Santa Claus and his reindeer. I don't recall the exact assignment, but my story went something like this: Santa was busy preparing for Christmas eve but Rudolph was sick. He had a bad case of sinusitis that was troubling his abilities at using his nose so bright to guide Santa's sleigh that night. Santa called the vet and Rudolph was provided with some hay-flavored NyQuil and the swelling quickly subsided. My classmates thought it was brilliant, as did my teacher, who eventually showed the story off to the other teachers in the same grade level.
The second writing assignment which I was required to do had something to do with a family of monkey children who couldn't read. Our job was to write a story about how the monkeys were to learn to read. Ever the problem-solver, I suggested with my story that the monkeys use Hooked on Phonics. It was all over the TV at the time and the kids on TV seemed to have no problem reading after using the lovely kits offered by mail. I talked this over with a teacher's aide who was in the classroom at the time and he loved the idea. He informed me that it was something that no other student had thought of and that it was also humourous. I finished the story and turned it in. Later in the week or month, I can't recall, I was sat down before the teacher who had given the assignment (she was actually something along the lines of a 'writing coach') and told that the story I had written was not only simply wrong, it showed that I wasn't actively trying to aid in the monkey's illiteracy. I will never forget essentially being told that I couldn't write something based solely on another person's opinion.
Reason #2: Entertaining those whom my writing entertains and spiting those who dislike what I write.
When some people get upset or overcome with emotion, they repress it. Then when another stressful event occurs, they repress those feelings too. It gets to the point that they have all of this pent up emotion, frustration, sadness, anger, and it materializes itself in various ways. Some people can't take in any emotion at all without going off in a violent manner. This goes for happy emotions as well as angry and sad ones. I know people who get physically angry at the slightest little inconvenience. Some people I know get sad and immediately project their sadness to the people around them so that everybody has a sad day. My grandmother died barely two years after I began writing short stories. Needless to say, the loss of a mentor is never an easy thing, let alone if that mentor is your grandmother. Emotions bottled!
A month later, Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. Among the innumerable people that the storm affected was your humble narrator. I was twelve feet away from the impact zone when an 80' oak tree came crashing through my grandfather's room. I saw the mirror fly off of the wall, I saw the mess of attic insulation and green foliage soaked by rain come through the roof, and then I saw the inward rush of air slam the door shut in my face. Later down the road, when school was finally resumed, we were on the bus in front of my middle school. A teacher came aboard and told us that the power in the school was off and that we were to go inside anyway and sit on the floors in the halls, backs against the lockers. We were corralled into the school like prisoners of war where we were told that we weren't allowed to speak or leave. It was September, though the outside temperature was still around 80 degrees even though it was only 8 in the morning. The interior of the school was even hotter. It had been locked up all weekend and the air conditioning was out with the power. The already-antiquated school had been overrun with mold and mildew in the tropical heat of south-central Louisiana. We were eventually allowed outside and given meager breakfasts. Again, outside the temperature was only rising. We were made to stay seated on the front lawn of the school, still not allowed to leave and still not officially permitted to speak. One boy eventually got up and tried to walk home but he was ran after and forcefully returned to the front lawn by teachers. I won't make this another Katrina blog: I already have a collection of those, however: Emotions bottled!
I continued writing that autumn and I watched, as my emotions darkened and I entered into a dark period in my life, my writing also became darker. I began writing about shadows that were alive and of demons, and of bizarre world-ending scenarios where many people were as equally dead as I felt.
I eventually lightened up a little bit but not by much. Summer of 2007 arrived, when I somehow came to be in a relationship with an actual human female. I began to write poetry of my own volition; poems of happiness and love and of the magic that can be shared by the romantic entanglement of two people.
A year and a half later, that relationship died along with the joy in my writing. Twenty days later, I watched my father die. That same day I lost the ability to feel the bulk of my emotions except through writing; that same day, infinite universes which I had yet to create through my pen were condemned to suffer silently with me. To this day (as of this writing,) my writing style is still made up largely of dark environments only with bursts of color from key people or the people in my stories who are truly good.
Reason #3: Emotional management and an auxiliary way to feel emotions.
An added note to the above statement. In the event that someone may read this: I can still feel emotions, though not in the same way you can. Whereas you may feel a plethora of emotions due to what I would see as an inconsequential event, I feel the most basic of emotions readily: anger, sadness, happiness, and my most favorite of all emotions, beautiful indifference. It's the more-complex emotions I have trouble grasping. Example being a friend of mine had a person near and dear to their heart terribly wounded in an accident and I simply could not see why they felt the way they did. Writing is what allows me to project and receive those higher-level emotions. Without a pen and paper, I'd be a completely emotionless shell of a human being.
The fourth and final fathomable function of my pen-to-paper process is an easy one. When I was in middle and high school, for better or worse, I always found a way to get more downtime. Be it I finished my project early or was a truly slovenly slacker, I could more often than not, be found with a five-subject notebook before me, turned to the fifth section, drawing story webs and writing out fun fragments of stories because I had nothing else I'd rather do. I started writing for my own enjoyment and not solely to show to others in the winter of 2005. For a while, I was over my dark period of writing as means of emotion management and onto writing for personal enjoyment. This reason hit its peak in November of 2006 when I had moved to Mississippi from Ohio to spend more time with my father. Moving mid-school year caused problems in one of my classes. It was a computer class and, due to the way the school computer system was set up, I couldn't be added to the system to do the work that my classmates were doing. I was placed at a desk and told to keep myself occupied until class was over. I grabbed a notebook and began writing and never looked back. To this day, the first story I wrote in that class is one of my personal favorites out of all my works. Among the more epic pieces I have written and all the ones I hope to write in the future, that one story, as well as the story about nuclear war mentioned in the beginning of this article, will be marked as the thing that drew me into this life of creating simply for the sake of creating.
Reason #4: Personal fulfillment.
If you made it all the way to the end without cheating, I should write you a beautiful sonnet about how noble and patient you are, but really, it's 4:30 in the morning. Check back for more. Hopefully I'll remember to update my blog more often.
