Why Do You Write?

For many years, I considered myself a writer. I wrote poems, short stories, book reviews, essays, blogs. I landed paying freelance gigs like promoting a new SanDisk thumb drive, a Gallium Arsenide semiconductor circuit or the Red Unit of the Ringling Brothers circus — really.

Now I’m an author. I write and publish books of poetry, short stories, essays, writing guidebooks and most recently memoir.

Authoring is WHAT I do.

HOW I write has evolved:
* pen on index card
* to pen-and-paper
* to Smith-Corona electric typewriter
* to a Very Paleo Macintosh Plus (30MB hard drive)
* and now a laptop (sometimes the Notepad app on my phone and the blank backs of flyers someone posted at the public library advertising a macramé workshop).

As a writer, I learned to use word processing software, especially the spell-check backstop, the cut-and-paste function, and of course, the New Blank Document and Save functions.

As an author, I have become fluent in using the Create Space self -publishing platform (now Kindle Direct Publishing) and many aspects of Amazon book marketing.

My ultimate HOW as an author has involved slashing my living expenses and freeing up half my day to write, on average. Plus, a full embrace of the monastic-grade solitude needed to pull it off for hours on end.

But WHY do I write?

That question dogs me as I read Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why,” which two ghostwriting clients in a row have hipped me to over the last year.

Sinek proposes that WHY sits inside of HOW and HOW rests inside WHAT like a trio of Russian nesting dolls.

According to Sinek, WHY and HOW reside at your core, in your limbic brain, versus your evolved pre-frontal cortex, the one with executive functionality that (falsely) believes it is running the show based on accumulating and analyzing facts and data.

Sinek cites the success of Apple as a classic example. Steve Jobs was the WHY of Apple, with a 1960’s radical’s stick-it-to-the-man ethos that believed ordinary consumers didn’t need a large corporation to empower or employ them. Jobs was like Reformer Martin Luther in the middle ages who proclaimed that every person is a priest and has direct access to God. You don’t need a priest anymore.

Steve Wozniak was the HOW of Apple, who figured out the technical aspects of designing and manufacturing a personal computer in the long ago 1980’s. The WHAT of Apple is that consumers spend twice the cost of a regular personal computer, and bring that device to Starbucks and work meetings to make the statement: “I think differently.”

In Simon Sinek’s view, I don’t buy a Apple laptop; I channel the late Steve Jobs and the student protestors from Berkeley and Columbia.

“So, Jon, why do you write?”

“I write to communicate with others” has a formal, pre-frontal cortex, academic ring to it; utterly false.

For poems, my main impulse is play: manipulating language, word meaning, word sounds and a buried rhythm. Plus, I have full latitude on choosing topics. James Dickey wrote a wonderful poem called “Falling,” about an airline stewardess who fell out of an airplane in 1962 and fell to her death. Phil Levine wrote about auto workers in his native Detroit. There’s a delightful poem in the current New Yorker about the Kiss Cam found at pro sports stadiums. I recently wrote poems about jumper cables, finishing schools and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s distribution of accordions to deserving German defense units, on the eve of D-Day, June 1944. To the poet, every subject imaginable is fair game.

In short stories, it’s 2nd grade art class all over again. There’s glue and colored paper scraps and torn magazines everywhere. I love the freedom of narrative collage, assembling a 2,500-word story from the debris field of memory, fashioning an intriguing setting and populating it with interesting characters. My motivation is assemblage, of blending disparate elements, of things you wouldn’t normally associate. In my stories, oil and water do mix, and the early bird does not get the worm; he starves for showing up way too soon.

Writing is a gregarious (literally “flocks” and “herds”) and social act for me. I want you my readers there right with me, whether that’s my parents’ honeymoon in Ojai, an ancient outcrop in Edinburgh, a forest path at Falls Lake, or the #21 Harrison bus in west Cincinnati on a drizzly Monday morning and the woman seated ahead of me is comparing how she is treated at the Walmarts in Kentucky versus the ones in Ohio.

I obviously write for immortality, and thanks to Amazon and digital file storage, my family and my friends can experience my quirky, clever world-view long after I am dust scattered along the raw blue shore at Cape Lookout, NC.

As an essayist, I’m writing to help others, in a professorial and adjutant role. I want you to have a better day today, and with accretion, a better life. I like to think of myself as an outdoor outfitter for my readers. Modern living is like Half Dome, the Appalachian Trail, and the Gauley River. I’m here to help you scale it, traverse it and raft the Class Four rapids, safely.

I’m a joker at heart, and should probably be engaged in stand-up comedy. I want to amuse you, with puns, jokes and irony. My Match dot com dating handle was “LaughYouWill,” with homage to Yoda on the syntax.

I write to leaven the dough, to lighten up: here is my childhood trauma, and my mid-life crisis (divorce and bankruptcy), and my stroke and debilitating depression, and here is why those dark, abyss moments are all funny as hell in the scheme of the Universe.

Why do I write, really?

Because it costs absolutely nothing, except of course, my time.

I write because (hopefully) you’re still reading at the bottom of this post.

Now, it’s your turn.

Why do you write?