Letter to Writer, Emerging (part 3 of 3)

V. Writing as Legacy

Books matter.

Bookstores and libraries matter.

Authors write books.

We write with a heightened sense of urgency, as if our footprints are on a beach and the ocean waves will wash them away a minute later.

We write to leave a miniscule footnote to History, a tiny Ibid and Op. Cit.

We write to say to a cold, impersonal Universe, “I was here and this is what I saw and heard, and loved.”

We write for our friends, children and grandchildren, to share tribal wisdom, and to show them the path.

We write for immortality, to outlive ourselves in some way and cheat death, so that in just over 100 years, an ancestor finds our diary, in an old Samsonite suitcase, or a cardboard box, and in 2124, learns what is was like in the early 21st century, to live through a pandemic, the same way we read about those who survived the Spanish Flu of 1918.

Or, we write just to write, to frolic in the wading pool and sandbox of language.

We write to know what we are thinking.

VI. Read and Read and Read

If you want to write, read other writers; poets, essayists, memoirists and novelists.

Keep filling up the reservoir of language in your conscious and subconscious brain. That reservoir will feed the deep well of your writing, providing water perpetually.

As long as you are reading, you will rarely suffer from Writer’s Block.

Here are ten other things to read, that are not traditional books, magazines or websites (some mundane and others evocative, but all written to communicate something important). Writers will take inspiration from anywhere:

• Cereal boxes
• Highway exit signs
• Roadside historical markers
• Bumper sticker puns (“Visualize Whirled Peas” “Metaphors Be With You”)
• IKEA Instructional manuals
• Tractor trailers on the highway (Rohr and Swift are trucking company names but also trucking puns, when you think about it)
• Signage on delivery and construction vans (What is a Grout Doctor anyway?)
• Coffee mugs and t-shirts (“This is What AWESOME Looks Like!”)
• Airport arrival and departure signs (LAX, PIE, SEA, FAT, DUD, MAN, NAP and ORB, are all IATA airport code names that are words).
• Restaurant Menus (Welsh Rarebit does not contain rabbit)

VII. Frosting on a Brownie

To review, start with baseline writing, then add cinematic writing and transformation writing at your discretion or as your muse insists.

Baseline writing is essential and potentially therapeutic.

The last two (cinematic and transformation writing) are completely optional, but they elevate your writing from personal to universal.

They are frosting on a brownie.

Recording (and sharing) your life is a delicious brownie, all on its own.

This essay can be found in Letter to a Writer, Emerging (2021)