The Voices I Borrow to Write: the Top 5 Reasons I Write

5. Epictetus said, “If you want to be a writer, write.”  Rather ironic, coming from the guy who may not have actually ever written anything down because all we have are transcriptions from his pupil, Arrian, but that’s beside the point. While I realize that being in college assumes writing, I also realize that writing doesn’t only emphasize the importance of what we would term “academic writing.” Up until the last couple hundred years, the academic curriculum included poetry readings, plays, and the arts. Isn’t it amazing that they considered these types of activities “academic” while today we snobbishly dub them “fine arts”? As if they could only be enjoyed and understood in black-tie apparel at night on the weekends from a plushy seat (at the very back of the theater because, if you’re like me, you can’t afford the front and center seats). Of course, I write academically. In fact, not a week passes that doesn’t see me revising some paper at 10 o’clock at night at least one day a week. But what would my ideas look like in a poem? How would I deal with a moral conflict in a short story? Do I have the stamina to carry a character all the way through the hero’s journey in a novel? If I want to be a writer, I need to wrestle with these forms of writing, too.

4. In his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald makes his antagonist, Monroe Stahr, say, “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” If I didn’t write, I would go crazy. There are so many ideas and viewpoints in the world and so many lives that I want to live and places that I want to go. I don’t want to be a “static character,” a “flat character,” or even a character; I want to climb inside multiple heads and get multiple perspectives. But overall, I want these perspectives to coagulate in me and make me one unique person. You know, the world is so exciting, especially for a person born with the curse of a huge imagination!

3. In a recent issue of Poets and Writers, Michigan-born poet Bob Hicok said, “The really cool thing, cool and joyously contradictory… [is], I disappear when I write.” Writing makes me not only a more intuitive version of myself, it erases me. Being a writer must be so humbling. You know, most people remember titles of books, names of characters, and details of plots. What they usually don’t remember is the major life conflicts an author experienced or when an author was born. Sometimes they can’t even tell you who the author of a particular book is! (If you are a fanatic of some author, I applaud you. In this case, you are “the Other.”) In some way, I want to be erased, but I also want the things I write and the characters that I create to live on.

2.  Perceptive Sonia Sanchez, an award-winning poet closely connected with the Black Arts movement said, “One of the most important questions that I’ve tried to answer is a question that you younger poets and writers must [also] answer, which is, what does it mean to be human.” There are so many people out there defining what it means to be me or you in a myriad of ways. Sometimes I feel overlabeled, underdefined, reconfused, and unanswered. (Yes, three of those words really aren’t in the dictionary.) As a Christian and as a writer, I feel like I am called to challenge people who want to say what it means for me – or for anyone – to be human. They won’t always have the right answer. Sometimes they won’t even have a logical answer! I’m not saying that I’ll always be able to articulate the correct answer, but, as a Christian, I do know where to get it, and I should be sharing it with others.

1. In the Bible, God says, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10; Colossians 3:23) You know, it scares me to show people what I write. I shake when I speak in front of people. I don’t always have the most articulated, beautiful (or even correct) concepts. But I love writing! It’s that risk, that permanence, that snapshot of a person’s mindset that makes it so attractive to me. God has given me a love of writing to cultivate, grow, and use. I will not be that servant who buried his lord’s gift in the dirt of fear (Luke 19:21). Perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18).