Why do I write?
I remember how I spent hours people watching, listening to conversations not meant to be heard. I noted dialog for a character and I smiled at an unusual response from someone reacting to a Subway clerk. I made notes on a tablet. When I tired of this, I pulled out a great book I had starting reading that morning.
I believe reading is the most important catalyst for writers. We understand the soul touching feeling from an outstanding story and it inspires us to produce concepts and conversations raging in our heads as writers. Our imagination holds no stop sign. Our minds are on overdrive. We fall in love with trees, flowing brooks and ocean waves crashing against jagged rocks. We are writers.
I’m a dreamer too. I feel everything intensely. I need to explain my feelings with words. My stories and poetry bloom from my own heartbreak, wrong choices or thrill filled joys. I have need to analyze everything, looking for a deeper meaning. I write lists of pros and cons. I find comfort amidst the pages of books and along side friends I make on the pages I turn. My mind holds a container of thoughts and my only outlets are words I let spill out on paper. Sometimes I find answers to the questions in my head. I live for those days where I feel I’ve put perfect dialog or an outstanding ‘show’… not tell, on a page that hopefully brings my words alive.
If you’re writing, keep writing. With every sentence, paragraph and page you complete, you will become a better writer. As a Word Weaver president, I have a passion to come along side people who wake in the middle of the night with words lighting their brains afire with ideas for their next article, book or screen play. As a Christian based writer’s critique group we encourage and keep one another accountable for the very best writing we can put on paper. We know God has a plan for our desire to write. We know our words will glorify Him. If just one persons sighs or laughs or even cries when they read our work it’s worth the hours and hard work our writers put into their craft. The real triumph lies in the quality of writing, not the act itself.
Have I answered my own question? Maybe not, but I want anything I write to be something God approves of, something ultimately to be for His glory! If one of the poor choices I’ve written about or my testimony of how God works in my life, or what I’ve learned from seventy five years of life helps another individual in some small way, then I have answered my question. Amen!