Why Do I Write?

 Note: In my goal to return to writing this year, I ran across this piece that I wrote about eight years ago, long before I married and long before going to seminary. It appears in the Langdon Review Literary Journal along with a few creative non-fiction pieces. Reading about my "writer self" is necessary to help me to return to a place of joyful writing. It's interesting to see what direction I saw my life heading back then. I took a detour for sure, and headed down another path - pursuing a Master's of Theology. Now I see how these two roads - writing and ministry - converge "in the now." Writing is God's Creative Breath!

 

     Someone asked me the other day why do I write. What exactly is the motivation behind the pen meeting paper. I pondered that for some time because I never thought about it.  I just do it.  I view writing as an intrinsic trait, inherit in my soul, in the marrow of my bones, placed there by God, the Divine One himself, because there is no way that I can take credit for the sense that my writing sometimes makes.

      My writing is borne out of confusion, frustration and emotional overload. But more than that, I write out of pure need. I have to unleash the thoughts that wander through my mind. I have to provide a platform for conversations to take place for the characters that call me out and insist that I tell “their stories.”
     I have no choice but to write. Writing is the air that I breathe. Writing is the water that fertilizes my soul. In the most cataclysmic way, writing is earth’s rotation, the mysteries of the sun and her twin brother the moon. Writing is an outlet, an avenue for me to vent and say things that I could never find a way to do otherwise.
      Since the age of six, I’ve known that writing was my destiny. Whether it was fiction, peppered with real-life events, or expressing thoughts through an essay about an environmental or world event, writing is my way of communicating to people that I might never get the opportunity to meet.
      I began my writing journey as a poet. Lines rhymed and not became my focal point for so long. Then somewhere along the way, I ventured into writing short stories, mostly based on experiences told to me by my mother. That’s when I knew that writing had invaded my being and was here to stay. I found myself at a point of not being able to get enough of the writing. I was driven to the page time and time again to pore over words. And like a musician composing a new piece, I had to find the crescendos and the fortissimos in it all.

And I did.

 

     I began to find that much of who I am rested in the intricacies of the antagonists, the purposes of the protagonists and the sheltered lives of the supporting characters.
     The more I wrote, the more I learned about myself for my own life was reflected in the very fortes and b flats of the cacophony that rang true from the pages of these characters.
     The turning point in my writing came about when I had this notion in my head that I could write a full-length piece. I scripted the thoughts and actions of characters as they came to me and I was determined to allow their lives to be lived one page at a time.
     The challenge came when I skipped ahead to the ending of the stories and thought less about the “in-betweens” that occurred. The thing is, I knew what was going on, but it wasn’t as intense and wasn’t as much of a page turner as some of the other events that were happening.
     I realized even more that art does mirror real life for there are times when the mundane sets in and the goings on in our lives just are not page turners. It is during those times that we take a break and pay attention to the smaller things and sometimes that’s where the real story takes place.
      I have tens of notebooks filled with finished and unfinished thoughts, words scribbled in the margins and one-of-a-kind thoughts written upside down and downside up in the footer section of the page.
     Stories of life in East Texas told through the eyes of a six year old boy are there. Experiences of my travels to the East Coast and the ensuing times that led to my living there. Rowdiness of men gathered around a domino table on a hot Dallas day and the PG-rated conversation that is the norm, is there.
     And then there are the longer pieces, the 100-plus pages of a story, true in nature, filled in by “immersion journalist” research of a little girl in the south central town of Mexia, Texas who is murdered in the 1950s and her death is relegated to just being from natural causes. Ever so often, I can see the image of the little girl begging me to return to this piece so that her spirit can finally be at rest.
     I still don’t know how she picked me to tell her story, but she did, and I suppose the onus is on me to see it through.
     In another novel-in-progress, three characters sashayed their way into my life in the early 1990s when I was a student at North Texas State University, earning a degree in Journalism and English Literature. It happened, of all places, as I sat in an English lit class reading about writers from yesteryear. Fast forward eight years and those same characters brought in family and friends that have now meandered in and out my life, dropping tidbits about their experiences.
     One of the characters beckoned me to start researching the Civil Rights era that took place in Chicago. I did and out of it emerged 75 pages that I would have never anticipated writing. I now have historical facts intertwined with historical fiction. And in it rests a heinous crime.
     When I first began writing, the viewpoint usually was told through the eyes of a male character. I have often read where established writers tell of the difficulties of writing from a viewpoint of a gender other than your own. And then there have been those writers who will tell you that once a character gets in your head and begins to tell a story, it doesn’t matter the gender. Just tell it.
     I have essays about my father’s death ten years ago and the impact that it has upon me even today. I have elegies written to him of things that he never got the opportunity to learn about me, things every dad should know about his daughter but doesn’t because long before death separated us, absence was already there.
     Categorizing my style of writing is impossible as it runs the gamut from humor to creative non-fiction to intense drama. Not every story has a death in it, but there is always an underlying hint of an ending or demise of something of great significance to one of my characters. Somewhere that is a true and real reflection of me, but I have not yet figured it out.
     Several of my most liked pieces have appeared in literary journals in Texas and a few have received notable commendations in a national scope. Two years ago I co-edited an anthology of works by black writers from around the country.  How one gets from writing to then reviewing and editing other people’s writing is a story in itself.  I’ve had the opportunity to be selected to writers’ communities on both coasts, being mentored by famed writers Jewell Parker Rhodes, Patricia Elam and Colson Whitehead.
     People often ask if I am a writer by trade or by hobby. I always answer neither. I am a writer by birth. It spills over into what I do in my career. Writing is what led me to Washington, DC to accept a position with the Smithsonian Institution. Writing is what afforded me national recognition in winning second place in the Copperfield Review Historical Fiction competition. Writing is what allowed me to have a following of sorts, that is, a group of other writers and avid readers who enjoy the words that I manage to put together through the guiding hand of the Creator. Writing is the impetus what will hopefully spur me on toward the discipline to get an MFA.