Ruminating on the Topic

Yesterday, I raised some questions about this blog, but just as much about the notion of writing for the average avocational writer -- that person fortunate enough to place a piece here or there, the question was at its root: What's the point?

While I dwell on that question a bit for myself, I thought it might be worthwhile to share some other's thoughts on the topic, first up is Julia Patt, whose microfiction took home the grand prize in Stymie's first ever Trading Card Fiction contest. Here's her answer to what's the point, or rather, why she writes:

So, it all started with my childhood. I grew up rough on the streets of Baltimore. I survived only by my wits, and struggled through a difficult and often dangerous adolescence until I learned to find solace in the written word. I read David Foster Wallace and Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner and they turned my cynical worldview completely upside down—or at least focused it to something purposeful. Art, I decided, was the answer.

Well, actually. That’s not my story.

Really, it all started in Naples, Italy, when my parents decided to immigrate to the United States in hopes of a better life. We settled in New York and began the near-insurmountable task of assimilating with American culture and finding work in an unfeeling city. We were often cold, often hungry, and at one point my siblings and I were placed in an orphanage because our parents could no longer afford to feed us. While there, I came under the tutelage of a young sister, who gave me contraband copies of Allen Ginsberg and J.D. Salinger.

Sorry. Not me again.

I’ve also never fled the tyranny of a totalitarian regime, explored the machinations of organized crime, or invaded a foreign country. I’m not a veteran or a political prisoner. I’m a vegetarian, but that’s hardly subversive nowadays, is it? I jaywalk more than I should. And I got a speeding ticket in Virginia once. It kind of sucked. I called my Mom. (Hi, Mom.)

And it gets worse. I wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider. Gamma rays didn’t hit me and turn me into an angry, green person. I‘ve never (to my knowledge) fallen into a vat of ambiguously radioactive material. The Empire’s troops didn’t kill my foster parents. And my escape pod didn’t crash on Earth after my planet was tragically destroyed. No one’s ever delivered the maxim, “With great power comes great responsibility” to me in a serious and sincere tone—or any kind of tone.

That’s the problem with contemporary writers. We have lousy origin stories. We’re students and baristas and telemarketers and IT professionals and teachers and communications assistants and media-marketing specialists. I mean, maybe one in a thousand of us is personally interesting. And I’m very suspicious of those people—when, exactly, did they find time do such exciting things? And why do they bother with something as silly as writing when they have fascinating lives to lead? It defies comprehension.

Or it would, if the daily mechanics of living had anything to do with why people write. Which they don’t. That’s the point—at least for me. I write, not because of the minutiae that make up my day and not because of my well-adjusted and suburban upbringing, but in spite of those things. I write to get at the good stuff, the stuff that moves me. What’s going on in the world, good and bad; what’s going on with people, collectively and individually and psychologically (and other adverbs); and what might happen with all of it. That’s interesting. Way more interesting than what I had for breakfast or the walk I took to the park. The good stuff, the stuff that makes you stay up all night reading because you have to know what happens next, who wins and who loses or who lives and who dies, because it’s a damn good story.

It’s the same impulse that keeps me up writing—and I think it’s born out of that love of reading, that love of story outside of our experiences than makes people write. Honestly, if you ever meet a writer who says he doesn’t like to read, that all he needs to write is his own life, do me a solid and slap him.

To read the rest of what Julia had to say on the topic, click here. And while I ruminate a bit more on the question of "what's the point/why I write?" I'll keep posting these mini-essays every so often from places like Stymie and elsewhere and maybe, just maybe we'll find an answer in all those words.