Authorship Blog

You Should Write, she said

           Everyone who knows me well often tells me that ‘you should write.’

           This evening, my daughter said, ‘You should write.’ Hearing this made me uncomfortable. Thinking about it now, the flesh beneath my skin itches. When she spoke those words, I wanted to look away in shame and embarrassment.

‘You should write.’

When I was a child, I used to say that I wanted to become a writer. I read voraciously. Fiction was  my primary diet. Fiction books were my closest friends – my BFF’s – so-called best friends forever. In those days, I cared for Steinbeck’s people, such as Lennie and his friend George (in Of Mice and Men). I admired the stoic heroism of Tarzan (a knight from the Dark Continent, and an avenger who predated the Dark Knight himself). I cataloged the adventures of Holmes and Watson – men who never once demonstrated fear, who were confident and strong and vigorously active and energetic (how I wish I had the chance to march across a dank, dangerous, dark moorland to face death and reveal the truth!).

            Now I believe that I mistook these imaginary friendships as a sign that I wanted to write. Now I believe I wanted to live – by reading novels of every stripe. I really didn’t want to write per se as much as I wanted to enjoy the feeling of satisfaction and insight that fiction often bestows.

For me, and people like me, authors are the wisest of humans. They and their creations explain what and why, and occasionally provide enough information to show us how to live. Inadequate though they are as a replacement for actual peoples, books were a deep source of my life energy.

I could bore you with that silly the lonely, shy child stuff. But won’t go into that. What’s really important to me now is that I must change my reaction to this statement: ‘You should write.’

When my son and daughter tell me this, I feel an enormous obligation. And fear … that I am letting them down.

I have nothing important to say or show you, truly. Nothing new or unique.

I can only write about what I hope is a worthy sentence or two. But only because my kids, who are at the door to young adulthood, just a couple of years away from leaving for college, tell me that I should.

I must rise to their challenge: I must provide an example of perseverance, of overcoming doubt and fear, of rising to meet the higher expectations of those I love, of demonstrating that I am worthy of their love, attention, and praise.

I must be worthy of their concern.

Hence these few words. We’ll see what more I may be able to produce.