Why Do I Write?

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I write to express myself.

I write to be heard in a world where getting someone to listen, really listen, is increasingly difficult.

I write to remember, the past, the details, to preserve them for myself and my descendants.

I write because, with words, I can paint a picture my hands could never draw because my skills as a traditional artist are rudimentary at best.

I write because mastering the written word to make it tell the story I want to tell gives me power. Only I can write that story, because, only I, am me.

I write because sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write it.

I write because it helps me feel as though all the years I spent inside of classrooms, (first in kindergarten and all the way through high school graduation and then through all the years it took me to get through college to the point of earning a degree), were worth something.

I write because it gives me the chance to express how I feel without being interrupted as I might be if I was speaking to someone. I can get my thoughts down without anyone negating them. I can tell a story once and have it read hundreds of times. That is the power of the written word. The spoken word is only as good as the attention of the person you are speaking to, even with their full attention, what you say may soon be forgotten. Not so with writing. It can be read and reread as often as needed until it is remembered or understood.

I write to discover myself, to learn the wonders of my mind and how it thinks.

I write because I can. I have that ability, that freedom, that choice and that is how I choose to spend my time.

I write to fulfill the expectations of God who has been nudging me to write for many years.

I write to improve my writing, as a musician must practice his instrument of choice in order to learn how to play it and then to play it better and finally to master it.

The idea for this exercise comes from the book, Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. This is an affiliate link. If you choose to purchase this book using the link, I might earn a few pennies, but it won’t cost you any more. I am currently listening to the author read the book and comment about how she wrote it as a 36-year-old and is now reading it as a 50-year-old. Her perspective while she reads it and her comments are fascinating, making me ever so glad I decided to take the easy way out and listen to it instead of reading it because I would never have had the chance to hear what she had learned in those 14 years of further experience. I am really enjoying listening to this audiobook. I speed them up to 1.6 or 1.8 speed and they are still perfectly easy to understand and I get more “read” in less time. Sometimes when my daughter hears me listening like this she teases that it sounds like the book is being read by the chipmunks, but then when I slow it down to regular speed I get bored listening and my mind wanders and I miss some things. So, I speed it back up and listen to it my way.

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