Tags
hope, imagination, lists, meme, publishing, vocation, writing
A friend sent me a humorous and truthful meme about writing. Picture an iceberg in which the portion visible above the waterline referred to published works. Beneath the surface of the water, the iceberg contains works in progress, completed manuscripts, weird ideas, rambling memos, scribbled ideas, good idea—bad execution, editorial contacts, more weird ideas, a work-for-hire outline, pages of dialogue minus names and narrative context, juvenilia, abandoned projects, notes that make absolutely no sense, incomplete outlines, poetic attempts to explain something no longer remembered, paper scraps of notes that may make sense in the future, and other writing efforts.
I could only respond, “On point.”
My friend understands the dilemma from a distance. I know the dilemma in a more intimate way. I have folders, notebooks, legal pads, paper scraps, voice memos, project lists and more on the computer, and other reminders of all the categories in that meme plus one or two categories that don’t fit any of the other categories.
Then the question comes, “Why write? Why bother?”
One of my writing friends echoes Dorothy Parker in his answer to the question: “I hate writing. I love having written.”
Another writer puts it more simply, “I love seeing my name in print.”
Still another friend says that she writes for her youth audience to plant seeds that may change the world.
I have a basic affinity with William Saroyan’s statement in My Heart’s in the Highland, which was published in 1939:
“I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.”
Well before I knew the work of William Saroyan, I had begun this lifelong undertaking. The usual round of short stories, poems, essays, and other scraps in grade school eventually grew to include letters and more from boarding school to college and the student newspaper work that helped pay the bills and the usual academic papers plus journals in college and grad school. And the writing continues.
I write to breathe, to make sense of non-sense, to understand the past, to imagine the future.
georgehdonigian 
I’m glad you have written AND write, as well as that our paths crossed when they did – and I am grateful that as far as those paths have diverged, they manage to keep intersecting in passing – or at least repeatedly coming near enough for waving and faintly perceived mumblings.
Thanks, GMC! Innumerable twists in our lives since those first days at Wesley Woods!. What a trip!
“Wesley Woods”? Did you miss the get acquainted night at singing Saliers household?
I certainly remember that evening–and a few other gifts mixed in with the MMPI and the TSI and a number of other shocks to the system.
“MMPI”!!! I have never looked at doorknobs the same since.
G. See attachment . This from the digital issue of Kolaj magazine .
Note? files scraps of paper, ideas . photo triggers yes all those things and sketchbooks and 33 years of Asian sketch ideas and notebooks plus , brushes, paints, paper, oil pastels , alcohol inks,,,, c’mon .
It’s just madness that we never want to end because it is parasitic as we ,who initiate it because it is our nature .
J.
Jason, I think our creative efforts are also ways to put off dying–or, as you said, because it is our nature.