Why I Like Writing

Although nobody ever asks me why I want to be a writer, I actually know why. I remember as a child being an avid reader from the first grade. My mother had taught me to read before I started school, and the stories in the first grade included a magic car - which I vaguely remember being driven by a curly haired gentleman and the car may have flown. (That's a bit sketchy... Mr. Fig was it?)

We didn't have the plethora of entertainment options then that kids have now, and my mother needed to give us something to do besides watching daytime television. (Daytime TV was geared towards the home-bound housewife at the time, and my sisters and I did enjoy the game shows, but at some point the soaps would come on, and my interest waned.)

Mother would sign us up for the summer reading program at the city library. We would check out books and read them, and sometime around the 3rd grade, I began to read anthologies of science-fiction stories. I read novels too, some of them classics of literature and others classics of children's literature. But it was the science fiction stories that really captured my imagination. Stories about people with time machines, ray-guns, rocket ships, and hyper-intelligent monkey side-kicks were my ticket to other worlds. As a reader, I sought the ambulatory effects that reading such works brought me. But at some point I realized that the stories themselves - though clearly magical works - had been created by mortal men, and that I could become such as them if I wanted to.

I could read these old anthologies, and smell the age on the paper. The fonts were different. The copyrights were from the 30's, 40's and 50's. Some of the stories had illustrations, and many had twist endings that rivaled those on the Twilight Zone. But what really struck me was that this sensation I got from reading these tales made me think that these old men, these dead men, had the same sorts of sensibilities that I had. They had the same sense of wonder, and imagination, even though they were really old - which meant that not just their stories had been captured on the paper, but also a snapshot of their thinking process. They had achieved a sort of immortality through being in print, and I liked the idea of that. I liked it a lot.

A more refined understanding of my feelings came in high-school when I learned more about Aristotle and the Aristotelian rules of drama. On the one hand, there was this famous guy named Aristotle who had produced rules for art. On the other hand, there was this guy named Aristotle who is arguably more well known now than he was 2300 years ago. And that's the magic of writing. You write to some imaginary audience and if you're published, it is possible that two thousand years ago some people may read your words and say, "Neato!"