WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” 

 Maya Angelou

Why do I want to write? Do I want to write or do I want to have written? What do I have to say that someone else hasn't already said? What do I have to offer that's new or different or special?

When I find myself beset by these questions, I refuse to entertain them.  I sweep them away.  I write for my life. Deep in my heart, soul, and guts I know that writing isn't something I choose so much as something that chooses me. I know I would write even if no one else ever reads what I've written.

I started writing "poems" when I was seven, because I was moved by the poetry my mother recited to teach and entertain us children as she rocked the youngest baby to sleep. I was swept away by the words, the rhythms, the stories. I wanted to create my own stories.

Once started, writing became my obsession. I kept little notebooks filled with poems, stories, drawing, descriptions of people I loved or hated. I wrote down what made me happy and what made me angry or sad. I wrecked vengeance on people who thwarted me and rewarded those I loved. I wrote plays for every holiday and cast myself and my classmates as the actors.

I didn't begin to write because I had something to say so much as to find out what I wanted to say. I didn't know what mattered to me, what I truly believed, what I wanted from life until I began writing about it. I didn't know exactly why I was writing except that it was something I had to do.

In addition to writing my own life I wrote down the stories my mother told me about the past. Her stories were filled with tragedy and hope, with characters who seemed to live before my eyes and make the people I knew only as ancient crones or patriarchs live again as children and young adults. Her stories were about her ancestors. Her stories were about growing up one of eleven children, the daughter of a coal miner/ farmer and the meanest mother who ever lived. Her stories were about meeting my father and his family and his stories. I listened and then wrote my own versions as I imagined them.

I didn't think about publishing until much later. It occurred to me that all these lives, all these people who lived, struggled, had plans and hopes, and who died without leaving a mark on history should not simply fade into oblivion without having been acknowledged and in some small way celebrated. I felt this was what I did by transmuting them and their stories into my fiction.

I write for my life. I write for myself. I write to share my writing with anyone it happens to touch. Why do you write? WRITE ON!