Christy Writes: Why I Write
Of course I stole the title of this piece from Joan Didion, who stole it from George Orwell. Unlike these two, however, not that many people have heard of me, at least not on a global literary scale, which is why I find it all the more imperative to address why I write. People read essays like this with names like Orwell or Didion on them because they’re fascinated to find out what makes well-known writers so good at their craft. Perhaps we want it to rub off a little, making us better at our own work, or maybe we feel it’s enough to read it, then give a slight, knowing nod that says “I hear you, Joan Didion. I get it,” and walk away feeling a little closer to her.
You aren’t reading this because you’re terribly interested to know why Christy Potter writes. But perhaps you should be. I write in spite of the fact that I’m not well-known, my local library doesn’t have a shelf full of books with my name on the spine, nothing I’ve written has ever been assigned to a high school literature class. I’m not even a crossword puzzle answer.
Yet.
It’s my one-word thesis.
I write because I believe the world will, at some point, want to hear what I’m saying. It’s an ego thing only incidentally (all writers have a big ego no matter what they tell you). Mostly it’s because I’m not extraordinary. I don’t think what I have to say is particularly mind-changing, revolution-starting, or belief-shattering, and the days when people listened to those who stood on their soap boxes and shouted ended the moment everyone grabbed a megaphone. Now the ones who shout the loudest are usually the ones who aren’t saying anything at all. I write because I don’t find myself all that different from anyone around me, except for the fact that I can write. As Anais Nin famously put it, “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” If I can put pen to paper and give voice to what everyone around me is unable to say, that’s reason enough to be a writer.
I write because I don’t know how to not write. I write because, as with so many others before me, I started writing when I was very young, and once you make a promise like that to your child self, you can forget about reneging on it. It will follow you around forever, throwing its shadow over everything else you try to do, dropping what ifs for you to trip over, whispering around your thoughts like an unrequited love.
I hope every artist feels that way about their art, no matter what their medium.
Like a lot of writers, I was a dreamer as a child, but not particularly shy or socially awkward other than the fact that dealing with others meant I had to make an early exit from the party going on in my thoughts.
When I was about 11, I developed a fascination with time. I was obsessed with the whole idea that time, while something we block out in seconds and minutes and days, in seasons and decades and calendar pages, is still abstract, uncontrollable, truly measurable only when it’s behind us. In school one day, the teacher gave us my favorite assignment: write a story. I wrote mine about time. Specifically, it was about an argument between Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow over which of them was the most important. After the teacher collected our stories, he read them out loud, without saying who had written what. When he finished mine, a rumble went around the room, and he said “Well, I think we all know this one is Christy’s.” I was alternately mortified and elated. Mortified because what 11-year-old wants everyone in her class to crane their necks around to stare at her? Elated because I had a writing style, I had a voice before I could even comprehend what that meant, and everyone knew it.
As you might expect for a child who not only dwells on abstract concepts but anthropomorphizes them, people found me odd. Creative, yes, but odd. At the time, when everyone in my age group was obsessed with fitting in, I was devastated to find out my classmates thought I was weird. But like the John Waters movie I’ve always imagined my life to be, I had my moment when some of those same people came to my first book signing in my hometown. It’s pretty clear that now they find me weird and successful. I can live with that. Lately I wonder if perhaps I write so that people will continue to find me weird. It’s a badge of honor now, like a membership card I carry in my wallet. The Union of Weird Writers. Get called weird ten times, get a free sub.
I write because I hate it. I write because writing is a bastard of a taskmaster, because it drives me to the keyboard every day, because it takes ideas and sticks them onto my brain when I’m trying to fall asleep, because it pushes me out of bed in the morning, because it makes me read essays called “Why I Write” by writers more famous than me. I write because somewhere in the back of my mind lives the idea that if I can just write that one thing, that one blazing, glorious, perfect, searing, memorable piece, I’ll be done. I’ll be free of writing’s tyranny and I can call it a day and go sit on the porch with Harper Lee and drink sweet tea. But I know that will never happen because writing an amazing piece is like getting a good night’s sleep. It’s great and all, but you’re going to need another one pretty soon.
I write as an adult for the same reasons I wrote as a child. I notice things. As I write this there is a dead branch outside my window with a single, battered brown leaf that’s just barely hanging on. With every breeze that goes past, I expect the leaf to give up and go with it. But instead it shudders and waves and settles back down. It seems noteworthy to me, the rather Wyeth-like quality of this scene, and I think it might be a metaphor for something or the beginnings of a poem. I will never find out, though, because four seconds later I’m noticing something else, and also I’m writing this.
Having spent the majority of my career as a newspaper journalist, this all felt, for awhile, a bit dirty to me. Writing books, magazine articles, any kind of creative pieces were what I had fantasized about for so long, and then it became my live-in love. It saw me in my pajamas, crying, disheveled, drunk, exhausted. The fantasy has become a reality and I’m not sure what to make of it. But I have gradually learned that it’s not about what I’m writing, it’s about the fact that I’m writing at all.
I write because it’s my art. I write because I have pictures in my head and I can’t paint. I hear music for a song I can’t compose. I write to free the art within me the only way I know how. I feel so much art living and breathing and growing inside that I sometimes wonder if I’m swinging hand in hand down the right path with it. Fiction. Wait, non-fiction. Creative non-fiction. Poetry. No, wait. A play! An epic saga? A series! Did I already say fiction?
It’s this ongoing battle in my head that makes me write lines like these in my journal:
Invisible barriers,
walls I’ve put up
with no memory
of how to tear them down.
Stumbling, sprawling,
nothing beneath me
but my own failures,
nothing to break my fall
but my fear of falling.
Gasping for air,
straining to find the sun,
kneeling in the rain,
sobbing at Updike’s grave.
The path I’d so carefully laid
now blurred out by my tears.
The rain dries on my skin,
the tears dry on my face.
Onward and forward
is the only choice I have.
To go backward would cost me
far too much.
The ending I must write
is still out there
somewhere.
It’s those agonizing moments that stir up strangulation thoughts in my head when someone tells me they want to write a book “someday,” when they “have time.” The implication that it’s easy, the creative equivalent to a summertime hammock nap, makes me feel like I’m going to burst into tears or burst into flames or both. It’s not easy. If it were, I’m not sure I could do it at all.
I write because you don’t know who I am.
I write because I do know who I am.
My one-word thesis turns its back to me as I reread this and realize that even if you don’t ever know who I am, even if my name isn’t going to be spoken at the same cocktail parties with Joan Didion’s and George Orwell’s, I do know who I am. I’m a writer. I’ve always been a writer. I will always be a writer. And I will always be writing.
The post Christy Writes: Why I Write appeared first on Christy The Writer.
