Why We Write: A Compilation from Creative Nonfiction Classes, Past and Present

(This post is dedicated to Timothy Scott McClellan, a fine and outrageous writer. Write on, Timothy. We miss you. )

I write because my mouth can't keep up with my brain. Thoughts fill my mind like gusts of strong wind, carrying the songbirds of E.E. Cummings' verse. 

I write because I've been telling stories since back when they were called lies.

I write for revenge. To get the bastards back. You may think you had the last word but just wait until you see your name in print.

I write because my head is a balloon floating atop my shoulders, the pen and paper act as the ribbon tying me to the front stoop. The only indication of the birthday party going on inside.

I write because I love the smell of new books and I wonder what mine will smell like one day.

I write because when the time comes, I have nothing to say. Those moments where seconds turn into lifetimes and all the words you should be saying run right underneath your skin, slithering like electric eels.  The treacherous ever-expanding landfills filled to the brim with I love you's and Don't hurt me's rotting like hot wet garbage in the sun.

I write to leave a map of where I've been. Words as breadcrumbs, gradually revealing where I've wandered.  Where I'm going. How soon I'll arrive.

Sarah Merryman

I write to be known – by myself and, even more, by others.

I’m from a “good girl” family and I fit right in.  You know, “the pretty is as pretty does” environment - always polite, considerate, respectful, smiling.

Never mind that I felt like shit inside – that I wished my father dead because he loved bourbon more than me.  Never mind my agony when just the next year he was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer.  Smiling, polite, “good girl” ratcheted up a notch.  Only my pillow knew my rage, my terror, my sadness.

Now more than 50 years later, all that good girl façade has made me sick – digestive

track is a mess:  throat burns, voice weakened – acid reflux; colin “irritable” with protruding, inflamed pouches known as grief.

I want to write because I’m still mad about my mother’s oft-used reply, “Oh, don’t be silly!” when I asked the big questions like, “Why would God make heathens?” Why was that a silly question or, worse yet, why did that make me silly?  I wanted to know why my church sent people to the Philippines to save those naked people’s souls.

Jean

I write because I am impatient, because I need an explanation and sometimes the only way to get one is to write it myself.

I write because I have a cat, and my cat likes to lay on me and while my cat is laying on me, I’m forced to stay still, but not so still that I can’t pick up a pen and write.

I write because I am always late – either 6 minutes or six years behind where I should be. That may not make sense to you, but trust me, it’s a factor.

I write because, if I don’t write, I go a little crazier than usual, and that’s not good for anyone.

I want to write about huge, beautiful, introspective, deep, meaningful things – grand discoveries put into words never before used. But grand is not what is up my sleeve. No mysteries, no fantasies, no great twists at the end. I write about what I am trying to figure out, what concerns me and confuses me. To get into those places that I’m desperate to get out of.

I write about real life. About marriage and how ridiculous it seems, and though I find myself very happy in my marriage, it’s hard-fought happiness, and, being a marathon, there’s still plenty of time for one or both of us to screw it up. And I write about motherhood, and how I took to it like a buffalo driving a car.

That’s also my reality to write, although it’s harder and sometimes makes me cry. And then there’s my mother, and that always makes me cry.

But that’s what’s real and I always come back to that, even when I try to get all clever and creative—like once I took the Magical Realism class – and all I had in me was Real, with not a hint of Magical. No vampires, no talking teapots – just sisters, ex-husbands, crazy mothers and the occasional cat.

Sema Wray 
www.semawray.com

Many people have asked me, “Guy, why do you write?”  Usually I leave the room immediately, go out on the porch, stare at Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal taking turns at the bird feeder (they are never more than a few feet apart), and ask them, “Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal, why do you fly?”  He peeps and postures, gently tilting his head as if to say “say again, please, why do I what?”

They usually immediately leave the bird feeder, go out on their back porch (which is a small screened in section at the top of the neighboring elm tree), kick back and smoke a banana.  Mrs. Cardinal then usually saunters in her Van Gogh-like pastel shawl into her kitchen, and prepares a culinary dish to explain why she flies.  She returns to the porch at which point her husband in his regal sunburst orange red smoking jacket, looks up and softly murmurs, “why, don’t you look soft in that feather down pastel comforter!” 

They really are such the couple, aren’t they?  Just after dinner he looks at her, and they gently begin to stroke each other’s head plumes, and he whispers ever so quietly, “I fly because I love you.” 

Later that evening, someone asks me, “Guy, why do you write?”  And I nuzzling the top of her head coo, ‘“Because I love you.” 

Guy Ellard Frank

I write because I have stories to tell, words to put on paper describing my past, my thoughts, how I get to/got to where I am. I think my history is part of history, not just the events but what happened to me and to my friends. I write because I have something to say about being alive, about being young, about becoming old and in pain, about the lessons of that physical pain, and, of course, the emotional pain, about love, and loving, and not being loved enough, and not loving.

I write because I love words, love finding or remembering a word that has a precise meaning or connotation, finding the exact way to convey an action or feeling.

I write because I like having people react to what I have written, to have others tell me their own stories, to understand what I am saying, to tell me they like my writing, to compliment my writing.

I write because I want to make a connection, to not be alone, to tell someone else they are not alone. I write because I want to honor the past, to remember the simple, ordinary stories. I write because the experience itself is fascinating, how I can begin in one small room and end up in another time and world.

Cate Fitt

www.knitfitt.blogspot.com

www.etsy.com/blog/en/authors/knitfitt

I write because it's pretty.  I write because I have washed away all other possible outcomes for me and my potential.  Because I can't play basketball.  Because I have felt how it feels to really read, when it lifts you up and before you know it, you look down and your toes are dangling above the roof.  I write because I like the way it sounds, words in general and yes, the phrase, "I am a writer."  I write because I don't know anything.  I don't know what it's like to be in love the right way, I don't know what my dog is thinking when he looks so sad in the middle of a bright day, I don't know what it would be like to live in a world where you can take someone else's red and black grief and thrust it into your own chest.  I don't know whether, at a traumatic moment, your soul splits in two and you are left halved until you are quartered until you are sixteenthed until you are too missing to mention.  I write because I cannot just live on the surface, blissful and ignorant like I imagine some people are, the lucky fools.  I write because my ex-boyfriend wants me to, and for some reason I still want to do anything he wants me to.  I write because I was told once that I did it well, and at some other point I was told that again, and now I am stuck faking at something I want so badly to make real, before they can figure me out.  I write because I miss my siblings, because I can still see each one's scared face from behind their beds and can remember how it felt to be unable to save them.  I write because my nightmares worry me, because my dreams frighten me, because my monsters are never who I expect them to be.  I write because it is punishment.

Mary-Peyton Crook

www.prettyhowtown.com

I write because it was one of my first private territories. I may have felt alone a lot as a child, in hospitals, in a family with many children … but those isolations were not private. I found a facility there, in the solitude of writing. I felt praise the first timeI was asked to write something original. I was a child and it was a prayer. I don’t have that little bit of self history anymore, and I have no idea what I wrote. But I’ve always suspected some vague inheritance of ceremony in the kind of inside place I go to write. It feels sacred, I suppose. The stripping away of most everything on me.

As I kept writing and as I left childhood, I needed a stripping away; there was so much I don’t think I could have handled, carried, without a place to unpack it alleveryday, many times a day. I feel madness sometimes on that line between writing and not writing;. I resist writing because it points to miles of past madness; I give in to writing because nothing else unties the knots in the same damn way.

I also have not, since I was a child, exactly found joy in writing. I have found relief. I leave the page less unsettled, less itchy, less bad … less some or any double negative. Writing for me is the voice that breaks silence, the beat after a pause, the inhale aftera long held breath. It’s the bridge from the stories of sad things to the jubilance of sun on my hands and face. It’s a rope’s pull from the dream where my voice doesn’t work to the singing of wind through grass. No straight errand run, but a passage between frames, from experience to sense.

So from that, what about the art, or the craft? I resent the effort (by me only) to place this chemical reaction under a glass, or on a pedestal. I resent discipline. I can only honor practice, at least so far. For that I may never find myself between two covers of my own on a shelf. But the priorities are what they are. I don’t live to write better. I write to live better.

Anne Carle Carson

  

I pulled out my journal and wrote longhand from my mother’s bedside, mostly to keep myself from running out of the room. Four weeks after her death, the journal is still sitting in my bag.  It’s my prettiest writing place, a gift, I think, the cover decorated with a Van Gogh and meant to make me feel artistic.  I sort of miss having it out on my desk. But I don’t dare open it or read the many entries that start with “Right now I am sitting at my mother’s bed.”  I have to let those entries cool for a good while, let them lose their heat, let the lava become harmless rock.

Maybe it was a macabre thing to sit alongside the dying and take notes. Maybe it was nothing more than spying on despair.  But I couldn’t stop myself from writing. Nerves drove me to catalog the weird minutia of active death. I wrote about giving her morphine with a dropper and changing her bloody diaper as CNN en Español blared on. I wrote about my aunt watching wide-eyed from her bed across the room. I wrote about my mother as she finally turned into a crushed little bird, pale blue in all her extremities, her breaths rattling into the night.

Who in their right mind wants to remember that?  Only a writer, I suppose, someone who resists what time will do to shape more acceptable snapshots of memory. I write because I believe in story -- its beautiful parts and its ugly ones. I write because I believe in the often-frightening face of love.

Meg Medina
www.megmedina.com

www.girlsofsummerlist.wordpress.com

I write about my dad and his life.  I write about him so he doesn’t feel so removed from my life. I write about him as if I were a detective searching for what made his soul tick. I write about him so that he’s more than a pile of dust sitting in a jar inconspicuously next to the telephone in the kitchen.  I write to find out more about myself – the self that people, his friends, keep telling me he would be proud of. 

I write so my kids will be able to find my soul if they ever need to go searching for it.  I write so they will have a record some day far in the future that they may prefer to read about rather than ask about.

I write because that’s the only way I can figure anything out. The only way I can see myself through a problem or a situation is to put the words into sentences and the sentences into paragraphs.

I write about things and people that are so real to me. But sometimes the only way to do it…the only way to make it painless for those around me is to call it fiction instead of real life. It’s easy to write about someone who sits in a jar on your counter.  The jar doesn’t critique.

But what I know each time I write is that what is inside that jar or maybe what’s floating up in the stars is the soul of a man who gave me more than either one of us realized. He gave me the desire and the drive to write.  He gave me his passions and some of his emotions.  It’s just a shame that even though he can’t critique me that he can’t enjoy me either.

I write for him.

Julie Farley

www.juliefarley.com

I write because it’s cathartic to stop the swirling in my mind and dump it, clearing it briefly before it fills again with bits of conversation and lots of worry and schemes and wonderings and hand-wringing questions about the meaning of life.  My life.  I write to bear witness to the little beautiful things in life others might miss, I might miss if I wasn’t looking for little beautiful things to write, and I write to bear witness to the injustices I see.  I write out my anger and my heartbreak and my neuroses and my empathy and my pettiness because something other comes out on the page, something I didn’t mean to write, some realization that my mind’s churning alone cannot produce, and I am eager to find out what it is, I am eager to know it and the only way to know it is to write it.  Sometimes I write to honor, to eulogize, or to hold up some bit of experience I’ve loved or suffered for others to see, though it makes me vulnerable, I hold it up and sometimes I’m rewarded in someone else reflecting their own experiences back at me.  I write because I am less awkward on paper than in person.  I write because I can’t not or because I am not whole or cared for when I don’t.  I write because not a moment spent writing feels wasted.  I write because it is my purest form of what I want to be.  I write because stories are in my blood, as they were in my father’s, and maybe because he can’t tell his stories any more, maybe because the slow, painstaking words he speaks now are often nonsensical, at least to me, and I wonder if his stories are maybe still trapped in there, in him, and how torturous that would be.  Maybe that’s why I spill them out now, empty myself while I can.  

Emily Gambone

www.onefaintingrobin.com

  

I write because I want to see what my thinking does to my emotions. I want to see my thoughts, concrete, on the page. Sometimes I don’t write, because I don’t want to see these things, as well… Today, “why I write” is because I have some stuff going on. (My cat is sitting here on the desk. Probably not giving a shit why I am writing, as long as I have my presence near her.)

I write because I just celebrated with family and friends in NJ, the fact that I am glad that my mother (who I had so many mixed emotions about for so many years – that I feel are resolved, today) has turned 91 and looked better than she has in a long time. The fact that we are no longer “threatened by each other’s presence is why I write… Sometimes I have

to see myself write that, so I actually confirm that that is a reality, not just fantasy in my head. I have put a lot of erroneous fantasies in my head for years, using my family as the blame for my warped thinking and drinking, too.

I write because I want to make sure I am being honest with myself, and others. I have not always told the truth or even acknowledged the truth. Now I feel good about the fact that I can handle it, without defensive maneuvering and posturing stances, without fighting it.

I write because I have lots of stories to share that I have still not put down on paper, about my life, about people in my life, about events past, present, and dreams for the future. I write because I sometimes need to vent. Writing out of anger – which I do not feel at this moment – is so much more productive than taking anger out on people, places and things… I let it go and move on, if I write about how my anger feels and affects me.

I write because I am a writer, a poet, a creative human being, who likes to express myself through words. I need to give myself more time to actually do this…I write because I want to stop censoring myself and my feelings and thoughts. I want to know myself like I want to know a new friend.

I want to stop wondering “WHY” I write, so I will just DO IT…I write… I write… I write…

Margaret Lerke Woody

Why do I write?  I write because of the empowerment reading has given me.  I’m nurtured by the written word.  I have found myself in haiku, poems, novels, and essays.  In return, I share my own written words in hope they will give nourishment to someone else with further hopes they will write and nourish someone else.

When I write, I am never alone.

My Poem

Nurture me, my words, my spirit

Nurture me and I will nurture you.

Cultivate my imagination

with Angelou, Neruda, Merwin.

Give my words seed

and they will take root and bloom.

Golden like a wheat field,

boundless as the sea,

and we will reap the harvest.

This is my second act,

my second  chance.

Death came for me like

thunder and twice I

told it not today.

The universe has more

growing for me

with my talent, with my soul.

What is divine? What is holy?

A newborn's first breath,

that the sun rises then rises again,

the promise of a rainbow,

that wildflowers blossom in untilled soil?

Nurture me, my words, my spirit.

Nurture me and I will nurture you.

When I write, I am whole.

When I am whole, I give the universe

my seeds, my words.

In return, my words are perennials of love.

Hope Whitby

    

I write to remember. It's so easy to forget. There are sticky notes in every room of my house, pens with inks in interesting colors are there, too, because sometimes the words just get away. Sticky notes trap words in the middle of the night.

I used to write to hide myself. Now I write to find what's in there. It can be surprising, sometimes.

I write to connect to people, to string a line between me and someone else. It's hard to hold someone at arm's length when your hand is so close to the page.

I write to keep the memory of a blue sky in September. The taste of tomatoes in August. To remember how that river sounded going underneath that bridge. Or how things change from the time I open my eyes in the morning until I close them again at night.

I write to let things out so they'll leave me alone. I write to let other things in so they'll stay.

I write to leave a trace of me.

I write because I miss it when I don't.

Mary Jo McLaughlin

  

Why I write... It might be to compile a chronological list of cars that I've owned or a way to record midnight confessions for posterity. The journal remembers, and that's helpful considering I can barely recall, well, anything from that webinar on health care coverage I sat in on just two hours ago. I write because of what someone said (sang) once... "someday, everything's going to be different, when I paint my masterpiece." 

David Sharrar

I write because one of me isn’t enough to hold it all. Over the years, I’ve tried to write through my addictions: drugs, alcohol, food, nicotine, caffeine, donuts, men. The high, the high, the high, the low, the low, the low. Beginning on the top floor of the penthouse suite, ending up on my knees in the gravel, shards of broken glass cutting up my knees. Words cushion the blow. I write because I can’t have all the things I want but I have way more than I need. Writing is a way to get and to give. To squirrel away a million tiny scraps and then purge, piece by piece, word by word, entire oceans. I write not because I’m a good girl or a bad girl. I’m neither and both in the neutered-nympho world of the writer. I write because it’s the hardest possible work with the least possible action, because it’s cheaper than a plane ticket or therapy. I write because it’s the adult version of passing notes, because it’s gossip and myth and music. A hand, a pen, no mouth, no breasts, no hard muscles in the chest, bloody ink smeared on the page, a suicide note and a birth announcement, a thank you card, a gratitude list and a dear John letter. I write because I feel too full and half empty. I need to rinse, reuse, recycle, pack it in and hack it off, because I’m ravenous, starving, greedy for more. I write because writing is my brain’s math, my brain’s explanation and excuse. I write because secretly I believe you have no inner life if you don’t and I desperately want an inner life. I write because when a person wears clean clothes and goes to the PTA and shows up places on time and takes a multi-vitamin and pays their bills and keep their vows and washes their dishes, they need something else. They need this. I write because a woman at my kid’s bus stop told me she caught a rat and shot it 30 times but it still didn’t die, it just screamed on, like a baby.

Valley Haggard