The main reason I write is because I cannot not write. It’s like breathing for me. If I stop, I can only suspect what would happen next. Plus I enjoy it. Just like I enjoy breathing. It keeps things moving, keeps the blood flowing, makes everything else possible. What’s not to like? But the main reason is, I have no other choice. It’s been like that since I was a little boy, maybe seven or eight, and “borrowed” my mother’s brand new letter-writing pad she kept on a corner of the kitchen counter, with its sheeny-white paper and lustrous, black-ink lines running so beautifully across the mind-beckoning possibilities of each page. I recall, just before the theft, I had been playing outside. It was your typical kid’s-mind summer day with the sky turned upside down like a gigantic ultramarine ocean, clouds like enormous fluffy schooners sailing across its horizonless surface, and pirate-birds screeching their attack-cry as they zigzagged this way and that on invisible ropes from one churning galleon to another. Then, for whatever reason, at one exact moment that scene, that vision or impression, suddenly locked or froze itself within my mind. I’m sure, at the time, I shrugged it off and went on playing. After all, what’s an epiphany to a seven year old, when you’re a one-eyed pirate about to seize one of Her Majesty’s gold-laden sailing vessels, or a bank-robbing outlaw, fleeing the horse-mounted, guns-blazing posse in hot pursuit.
Anyway, as I recall, at some time during the morning I went back inside our house (we lived near Naperville then), when I spotted mom’s new letter pad setting so ingenuously in its corner. Mutti, of course, was nowhere to been seen, and the next thing I knew I had grabbed up the pad and ran back to my bedroom. I doubt I had any notion of what I was doing or why, but I recall I lay down on my bed, with the pad and one my number 2 pencils from school and began trying to recapture that enthralling morning scene I had just witnessed outside, though in a somehow new and different way I couldn’t understand. Anyway, the epiphany had returned with a vengeance, the out-of-body moment was in full swing, when my bedroom door swung open, and she stood there.
“What are you doing, son?”
“Nothing.”
“Well then give me nothing back. I have to write a letter to your grandmother, and I saw you running down the hallway with nothing in your hands. I had no idea.”
I do remember, when I gave her the writing pad back, she looked inside at my half-page of scribbles and then looked at me with one of her more classic, bemused expressions. “Are you trying to write a story or something? Clouds like giant sailing ships on a blue-sky ocean, and birds like screeching winged pirates about to attack, or something?” And when I didn’t answer her, she just laughed and shook her head and left the room. For some reason, her laugh broke my heart at that moment. It wasn’t a mean laugh or anything. It was a mother’s laugh, a laugh of wonderment at the endless mystery of bearing and raising that other little life beyond herself. Still, it broke my heart. My epiphany was shattered. My brave new world was snatched from beneath my tennis-shoes-clad feet before I had hardly taken a step upon its magical surface. I cried into my pillow for a while and then lay there, sniffling, until she called me to come eat my lunch. But I was still heartbroken, eating my peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich and drinking my glass of milk with a broken heart. And it was nearly a whole week passing, before I was finally able to move on and steal the damn thing again–her letter pad–and keep on writing.
As I grew older, and read and read and read some more, and wrote the same manner, there was one thing I began to perceive, unknowingly at first, but then with a more definitive perception. I think it was when I was a soldier, stationed in Europe, and reading Hemingway’s and Joyce’s short stories, that I first began to consider this idea of “voice” as a writer. This, even as the notion of it seemed to wander off on its own, indifferent to my curiosity. What I did finally understand was that it was something you couldn’t learn from a book or classroom or another person. It was something unique and self-contained and unassailable. Something entirely unto itself. And maybe something I shouldn’t focus on or worry about too much, and just continue to dabble in those things I could understand. Things of craft and art. I did know, however, that, regardless of its esoteric nature, when you came upon it, you knew. When you came upon those mysterious and special writers who had voice–that distinctive, their-own-kind, way with words–you knew.. That is, when you read Katherine Mansfield or Cormac McCarthy or Annie Proulx or Toni Morrison, you know. No one has to come whisper in your ear. And all you can do about it, as your own writer, is be true to yourself. Know yourself and follow who you are in your writing. Nothing else out there works or even matters. And that’s what I’ve tried to do with my own writing. Try and figure out what works for me, and let the rest go where it will.
So that’s what this is all about. Either directly or otherwise, writing about what I think works for me. Showing that, hopefully, in an entertaining or, at least, somewhat interesting manner. Of course, I can’t always be sure. Who is absolutely sure about anything they write? I’m certainly not. And then tomorrow you find a different or better way to do something, and things before are suddenly suspect and the floor starts to sag beneath you. Even worse, all of a sudden you realize the entire draft of your novel is swinging the wrong direction and your heart breaks again, you’re in freefall again, and you have to find a way to steal mom’s letter-pad all over again and keep going. What this is not about is offering advice or information or instruction on anything to do with writing or anything else. As I’m sure you’re aware, the world is filled with those offering their confluence of opinion. This is about what works for me. Or what I hope does. (Yes, I know, hope is not a strategy.) Of course, if you’re able to glean any good from any of this makes it even better. On that note I will offer one bit of advice. If you’re one of those writers trying to be the best you can, and believe you have something unique to say, in your own unique voice, and you’re not prepared to have your heart broken a million times, perhaps you should have that little talk with yourself before it’s too late.