Why We Write

Congratulations. You live on the planet earth, and because you live on the planet earth, you're inundated daily with mostly useless data. TV. Radio. The Morning Paper. The blow-hard next door who just can't keep his damn nose out of everyone else's business. And despite all this meaningless information, you've decided you have something to say. Join the club.

I thought I'd start my blog with something interesting, but the fact is I keep looking at the clock thinking 'I really should be writing my NaNo Novel. Yes, that's right. Like everyone else in the galaxy, I am a nanowrimo participant. So you might be asking why in the hell I decided to start a blog in the middle of November. To that I answer with a resounding 'No Fucking Clue.' It seems like everyone has blogs these days. I felt left out.

So I guess you can guess I'm an amateur writer. I'm an amateur at a lot of things: writing, art, computer repair, life--in general. I may be a bit wet behind the ears but when it comes to anything, I believe that if someone tells you their a professional they're either lying to you, or they're an idiot--especially when it comes to the arts. The arts are trial and error folks--let's face it, if you say you're a professional then you're admitting to be a professional at 'winging it', at 'trying something new', at having no fucking idea where you're going or why but enjoying the ride.

I am not a professional. If I'm a professional anything, then I'm a professional hobbyist, a professional jack of all trades, a professional juggler of projects, and the occasional cat (kidding on this last bit, of course).

That said, I thought I'd take my first journal entry to explore a little. In this world so full of information, so full of nonsense and so chock full of words, people still write! People still find there are things worth saying, and this, I think, is an amazing thing. Millions, billions of books out there, and there's always someone who's come up with something new. The human mind is unbelievable. It's like a puzzle you can put together in ten thousand different ways, make something amazing every time, and it doesn't matter if you use all the pieces.

For myself, I remember being a little kid, cutting out cardboard hearts, and writing my parents poems about red roses and blue violets and happy-sappy things about how great they were and how much I loved them--from there, it ballooned. I wrote my first story on a journal my mother brought me home from the grocery store. She told me to use it "however you want". The story was awful, of course, as are all firsts in life--a disaster when we look back. I was determined to fill every page, every line. It's an incredibly liberating feeling, scratching the last words on the inside back cover and trying to read them years later over a faded floral pattern.
Since then, I've written a lot of nonsense and a few gems, but I take solace and pride in the fact that I will always be able to look back and think 'Mom, this is all your fault.'

So here is my challenge to you, any and all of my readers. Sit back. Close your eyes. Purse your lips in unimpeded thought (gag the children if you have to!), and answer that question for yourselves. Why do you write. What's so undeniable for you about this incredibly frustrating, mind-boggling, insanely uplifting, rejection-filled, spiritual experience that comes with putting pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard and letting them take you where they will? What do you love? What do you hate? And why, for god's sake, do you have to tell the world about it?

For myself, the answer is amazingly simple:

I write because my fingers like marathons. I write because my mind never sleeps. I write because day turns into night, because the stars still shine through the smog, and most importantly I write because I'm alive, because I'm breathing, because I, like everyone else in this crazy, crazy world, exist.

And that is what I hope to be able to claim--weeks and months and years down the line--that Uplift & Implode is all about--existing, being alive, and using words to express both life's greatest triumphs, and most crippling defeats--and more importantly still, where they lead us.