Why I Write

In this essay, I endeavor to explain why and how I write. (~13 minute read)

Emmalyn took this photo of me shortly after we met, in Laguna Beach, c.2015. She taught me about the stream-of-consciousness writing I’ve since gained so much value from.

As you know, I've begun publishing work online, and I think before I continue posting I want to write about how and why I'm doing this. I want to tell you something about how I create these posts. Intention is important to me. You are important to me. You are part of my writing, woven into its purpose.

Almost all of us have created short bio sections in various apps. How the hell do I put MYSELF into words, much less such a small amount? It's a fairly absurd ask. We're all complex, storied people with so much character and experience, preferences and quirks, and our language doesn't seem adequate to describe a whole person. I think of the BEST books I've ever read, the most descriptive, eloquent, intelligent and detailed writing of elite authors. None of these books give a full account of life, or of the people they illustrate. Like all art, writing involves far more exclusion than inclusion. It's a rational statement - there are infinitely more words that don't fit on the page than ones that do.

I've gone back and forth on the value of writing during the last several years. As I've been leaning more into making writing a profession, I've faced the questions head on: Is it worth your time? Is it worth your dedication? Why do you want to write? What I wish to do now is to give those questions some answers.

I will preface these answers by stating that I, like all living beings, am constantly in a state of change. What I feel about writing today is different than what I felt about writing last week, and next week or tomorrow will be different than today. One of the main arguments I have about writing itself is this fact that each moment is born and dies instantaneously. During the time it takes to write anything of enough length to complete an idea, emotion, or experience, the author has certainly undergone a change. I usually do not read my writing after it's been written. Sometimes I think I'll return to the top of the page, and decide I want to write something completely different. I don't want to do that. I don't want to have that experience with everything I write. It's a barrier for me.

I hope it's not fear-driven. I'd like to say it's just my philosophy on my own writing that I simply allow myself the medium of writing to let the words flow out of whatever places have access to my hands and fingers. I can be an editor, I just seem to enjoy it a whole lot less than laying the words onto a page in the first place. I'm spontaneous. I almost always am writing in response to something immediate, a thought, impulsive and interesting to me, or an emotion that affects me intensely. The other day, when I wrote and published the list of things I love in the RV, I just couldn't avoid writing it. The idea came to me while I was reading. It distracted me so much, that I couldn't continue reading. Over and over, louder and louder, this list of things I love in my home repeated itself and begged me to let it out.

I recall listening to a podcast by Andrew Huberman, a brilliant neuroscientist bringing advanced science to us everyday people. He said that sitting down and writing thoughts out in complete, coherent sentences is actually something very difficult for most people. I was surprised. I never appreciated my ability to do this, until someone else pointed out that it can be difficult. It gave me some stoke, made me feel a bit special, and allowed me to recognize a skill that I’ve got, a way that my mind works, and I try to nourish that recognition, and not kill it.

Maybe I'll have to change my process down the road, if my road turns out to be long enough to have a lot of years' distance to it. I'm always, always in firm possession of the fact that what I write today may be the last thing I'l ever write. This breath might be the last one I get. The hug I give my wife might be the last one I give and receive. Everything I write, all I do and all I say carries that asterisk. I think it's mostly an effect of my Dad's suicide as a one year old. When you experience a death like that almost immediately in your life, I think it changes you significantly. It gives you an instant understanding that life is fragile, temporary, and can end any time. I'm learning to use this to my advantage, and to stop being driven into depression from it.

Anyway, that's how I write right now. Everything you’re reading here on this Substack page has been written in one continuous session, and posted directly afterwards. In some cases, when I feel particularly vulnerable about something, I'll have Emmalyn read it before I share it. Just thought you should know this about me as a reader of my work.

The reason I believe I love writing so much comes from deep within my personality. I'm not a talker, per se. I'm quiet. I don't feel the need to say a lot of words in order to get a point across. Much of the time, I'm a very essentialist communicator, like most engineers. Relevance and efficiency are of high value. Em will attest to this - I feel a sharp frustration when she's going about something in a round-about way, or being ambiguous about everyday things. I get short. I show irritation. Not always, of course, none of this is true indefinitely. My friends and family know that I can be a talker. Under the appropriate circumstances, with people I trust, I'll express myself at length with my voice. I don't mean to state that I hate conversations, I just know that during most of my day I talk very little. The way this affects my writing is that I can say a lot without saying anything at all! It's wonderful.

To use the introvert/extrovert dichotomy, I think my majority shareholder, introvert, LOVES being silent and alone, but my whole self wants to be understood, listened to, and connected with others. Living beings have a need to be connected. To belong, and to know that we belong, we need to express ourselves and we need those expressions to be received. Writing can do this for me, where verbalized expressions often are much more reserved and held close within me.

That's a long explanation to the summary answer: I write to be understood. I write because it allows me to process these thoughts as completely as I can, alone and without interruption. I love to focus one something, for longer periods of time than I think is considered 'normal' today. When I find Csíkszentmihályi's flow, I can stay there for hours and hours. Even when it's physically exhausting, I stay with it. Even when it's painful, dangerous, and full of risk, I'm engaged and I'm thoroughly pleased.

Because I write from flow, I've got the challenge of tying things together in a coherent way. I think this is one of the key development areas I've got ahead of me as a writer. It's why you'll find me reiterating a point, summing up a thought, because I'm trying to provide some conclusion to my rambling. This is a good point to ask something of you: If you read my writing and any sort of feedback, criticism, suggestion comes to mind, please don't ever feel like I don't want to hear it, or that I'll be offended by it. The fact that I'm publishing my writing means I'm ready to receive criticism of it. It's a vital part of the learning process. Despite the apparent generally accepted cultural trend of being highly sensitive and easily offended, I'm most definitely not this way. One of the values I find naturally abundant in myself is to detach a person's statement from themselves. Language is flawed, and in so many cases inadequate to communicate what we intend to communicate. I don't hold what people say against them, especially when I haven't had the opportunity to question them about it.

Back in a college course on Philosophy, a professor taught a concept I'll always remember. Questions of meaning come before questions of truth. This value demands us to seek meaning from each other before making a judgement regarding truth. This can tangle things up, can delay us from making conclusions about truth that we might be dying to make, but I think it's an awesome, patient, compassionate idea. It takes practice and deliberation to learn to spend time in that awkward space between a statement and our truth judgement of it.

All that is to say that my intention is to create a space around my art, built with the blocks of trust and respect. It's probably a lot easier right now, when only a small group of friends and family are even reading any of this, but it's nevertheless something I'll strive to maintain. I welcome negative feedback. I welcome criticism. I welcome your perspective on the face of it - not under certain conditions.

Moving on. Another point I want to make within this thread is that I'll be publishing a variety of types of writing, on a variety of subjects. Sometimes I write essays, sometimes poems, and other times I'll be writing my autobiography. There are so many ways of slicing life up and looking at it. I feel as though I'll never run out of things to write. It's what allows me to sit down and go on and on. The flow just doesn't stop. The angle changes, the view shifts, and a whole new run of words is released. I don't quite know how to format all this variation within Substack, but I'll figure it out as I go along.

Another thing I wanted to put out there in this beginning stage of publishing work is that I'm not quite sure how to classify content in front or behind a paywall. So far, everything I've written and posted has been free to everyone. The reason I chose to accept a paywall immediately when I created my Substack is that I have the desire to start asking for support, for a useful return on the time I spend working on this craft. My dear friend Matthias has just become my first and only paid subscriber, and I was floored with gratitude when that email came in. This is a landmark moment in my writing journey. It's monumental. It's the first time since I started contemplating a career built on words that someone has offered money to be part of it.

I put the paywall in as an opening up to the possibility of receiving money based on the value of reading someone else's work. It's far from a demand, it's far from an expectation. It's just an invitation, an avenue opened up. I'll be figuring out how to offer something special to paid subscribers, but right now I'm likely going to continue publishing free content. It just feels right to me, presently.

Regarding the length of pieces I'm writing, about 2,000 words seems to be sufficient to say what's on my mind. This length seems to me a fairly easy period of time to read an email upon receipt.

An idea just came to me. I could write 2,000 word pieces for free subscribers, and write longer ones for paid subscribers. I do want to write longer work. I do have the goal of writing books. In many ways, my respect for your time, and my assumption that you only have a small slice to spend on any particular email you receive, holds me back from writing more. Right here's an example of the utility of writing for me. That previous sentence is a statement that flowed from me, but upon second glance contains a falsehood.

I heard Rick Rubin say that artists need to create work that they love to create. I've been writing about how I hesitate to write more because I want to make it clear that I honor your time as a reader. While this continues to hold some value, it may well be a poor excuse to limit my own writing for my own creativity. People read books all the time. People spend a lot of time online, consuming digital content. Believing in my own voice means trusting in the value of what I have to write. It's no small thing, this issue of trust. I wrote earlier of my wavering opinion of the value of writing - this is at the core of it.

Do I think it's right to ask people to spend time from their life listening to me?

There are issues of self-esteem rolled into this. Struggling to love yourself will create these doubts. My wife is a tremendous artist. Her paintings, in my judgement, are of extraordinarily high quality. She believes in herself, and she has begun asking others to join in that belief. She has been trying to teach me about self-love for our entire relationship. Eight years. Eight years of daily lessons, and I'm still at the beginning stage of self-love. It's very uncomfortable for me to maintain the value that my work has enough quality to be valuable to others.

During one of my periods of diminished self-esteem, I was having severe doubts about being a writer. Who am I to ask people for their time and attention? How can MY writing hold enough value to other people? What value could my writing possibly have? This line of thought was destructive. I stopped writing. I stopped contemplating making a living as a writer. I just vanished from my writing practice, for a LONG time.

One day, I was hit with an answer. Writing does have value, and it can be incredibly high. The reason I know this now, is because I LOVE READING. This gift of the love for reading has generated so much meaning for me. I've spent a ton of hours reading books, essays, poems, and letters. If I derive so much value from reading, how can I question the value of writing? Looked at from this perspective, my doubt of writing's value is absurd. If I can provide a fraction of the value I get from reading through my writing, it's well worth my time.

Another bit of evidence I've got supporting the idea of providing value with my writing comes from all the times I've written letters to people. I've seen the power of my words, I've witnessed the emotional reaction of my Dad reading a Father's day letter at the dining room table in our lake cabin. I've brought tears from people's eyes, laughter from their bellies, and love from their hearts. I just forget this. It gets masked and disfigured by depression, by anxiety, and by my patterns of self-destructive thought.

I attended a DBSA (Depression and Bi-polar Support Alliance) conference in Akron several years ago. I was impressed by one of the speakers, a doctor working at Harvard University, and a pioneer in the mental health research world. He seemed approachable, so after his speech I walked up to where he had sat down for lunch and pulled up a chair. I had a lot of things to ask him, but one question was louder than the rest. At the time, I was between jobs. It was a period of serious doubt. It wasn't long after I had received my bi-polar diagnosis, which rocked my world. I asked him, "How am I supposed to know what to do for work, considering this disorder?" His response was beautiful to me in its simplicity. He replied, "Find out what you do consistently across all your mood swings, and do that." Writing immediately floated to the surface. I write all the time, in depression and mania. I write when I'm balanced, and I write when I'm at an extreme.

I'll wrap this up now, with something for you. If you've read this, you need to know that you are part of something greatly meaningful to me. You are part of the building up of my confidence, of the encouragement that might seem like a pebble to you, but appears as a boulder to me. I'll never lose touch with the gratitude I have for you. Thanks for being you. Thanks for giving me your time. Thanks for being generous. Thanks for being in my life.