Why I Write

I fell in love with writing at a very early age. The idea that an author could create imaginary universes with a few strokes of a pen fascinated me, especially as a kid. I loved the way words could be meshed together to illustrate a point. I would read books and become more interested in the way an author told a story than the particulars of the story itself. I never cared much about the genre or subject matter; I just enjoyed the experience of spending time with well-crafted words. When strung together properly, words could become sentences that opened the gates to my imagination. The right writer could take me anywhere he or she dared.

I couldn't have been much older than eleven when I started the habit of underlining the sentences that touched me the most. It didn't matter if it was inside a textbook from school or a phrase out of the obituary or a few words on the back of a cereal box, when I noticed a beautiful sentence, I would underline it. I imagine I eventually ruined a ton of library books in my hometown growing up, but I didn't care. Some sentences, much like some people, need to be highlighted in life.

As a kid, I used to wander through my neighborhood with a tape recorder and interview any wino or prostitute or street dweller I happened upon. I would ask them the same questions I'd heard a journalist ask a politician on television or a writer ask a businessman in the newspaper. Most times my interviewees would laugh out loud at me and swear that I asked the dumbest questions. Jimmy Carter who? Ronald Reagan did what? Inflation on the rise where? Boy, them astronauts getting killed ain’t got nothing to do wit me! I was sometimes too young to fully understand the questions I ended up repeating. I just knew that these were the questions that writers asked, and I wanted to one day be just like them.

I don't think I ever wanted anything as much as I wanted to be a writer. In middle school, I remember being asked over and over again what I wanted to be when I grew up, but no profession appealed to me the way writing did. I didn't care about money. I didn't care about fame or social status. I just wanted to write a few sentences in my lifetime that were worthy of being highlighted.