Why I Write

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I write. I mean this is ALL I ever seem to hear from career authors. How ‘driven’ they are, how much an integral part of them it is…blah blah blah… It seems like I’m always reading some article or another where an author says:

I have to write, everyday.

It’s in my bones.

I’m not happy unless I’m writing.

I am really lazy. I can think of precious little, besides free beer, that would get me up and motivated every day to write. And, unlike Robert Bevan, beer and writing don’t combine well for me.

So I started to wonder if I was actually a writer, or did I just play one on television? Where was that piece inside me that was supposed to be driving me to the keyboard/journal/parchment/whatever? Was I just fooling myself?

I decided to deconstruct my whole path to writing and see if I could understand what I was now, by where I came from.
My happiest times, my bliss with regards to weaving tales was always in the midst of a huge tabletop campaign.

Dungeon Master

Game Master

Storyteller

(I’m experimenting with blockquotes.)

These were labels I could own, really identify with. As the years progressed and my gaming groups grew apart, created little pod people and generally had lives and partners that took them away from my stories, I found myself without an audience. Expatriating to Germany did alot to put the final nail in the coffin of my gaming. Sorry folks, my german is just not good enough to talk almost non stop for three to five hours.

I found myself in a foriegn land, head full, mouth quiet. I wondered if the stories would come through another medium. For the second time in my life, I seriously contemplated if it would be worth exploring…cue ominious music…writing!

I had tried this in the far distant past. During my gaming phase in highschool and early college, I thought it a shame that all those plots and character interaction gems were just disappearing like burst soap bubbles. My group/s and I tried to capture the ephemera of what it’s like to participate in a world-building, magical story. We used tape recorders, note takers, pre and post game written intros and outros and none of it really had the staying power and depth to reliably reproduce the campaign story for someone who didn’t participate.
Half written journals littered my life from the floorboards of my car to the back of my toilet and still nothing came to fruition. Looking back on this, I now know why I never really followed through with those other forms of storytelling.

It was because of the Game. The Game was always there to give me a fix, a sense of completion to the story, ANY story I felt I needed to tell.
So the reason I never seriously completed any writing while I was gaming was because I finished those stories. They didn’t need to be retold and in a harder medium that required even more work from me. *see previous comment about being lazy
That was when the light dawned on the marble head.

When I’m telling a story, I see it perfectly in my mind’s eye, sometimes in totum.

My view of the characters, the plot, the whole world is so intimate and real that it feels…well it feels REAL. Like these people and these places exist. By extension if I’m afforded a unique view into this specific reality I am also bound to tell the tale of what I saw/am seeing. I mean, If I don’t tell it, who will? There’s no one. I am obligated to convey what I have seen to anyone who will listen. My ego hopes that they are entertained, and come away with something from the telling, but frankly as long as I tell the tale and people read/hear it, my obligation is fullfilled. There’s an ‘easement’ of tension inside my brain around that specific tale. As if by me letting it out into our world, it gets what it wanted, needed.

Maybe it’s like this for other writers, and maybe they’re just too afraid people will think they are crazy if they admit it. But the truth of the matter for me is:
1.)These worlds and the entities in them are real.
2.)I’m the only one who can talk about what I’m being shown.
3.)Because of one and two, I have an obligation to put those narratives out there for other people to experience.

So I guess my answer to “Why I Write” is because I must.

______________________________________________________________________

The Secret Life of Statues is coming out on December 22nd. Look for updates and links on where to download the ebook here on my blog, and ‘LIKE’ me on my Facebook Author Page.