Episode 10: Why Do You Write?

Today's episode is called Why Do You Write? I personally started writing when I was about seven, and for most of my childhood, I thought of it as something I was just good at.

I was the editor of everything and got the compliments and A's in English, all the usual evidence of some sort of natural born talent.

And because it came easy, I never really fought for it.

So I didn't understand yet what it meant to me.

Then my life went in a very different direction.

After a life and death medical situation, I was drawn into the field of nursing, which I can see now was part of, you know, that was me trying to get some control back over my own body after kind of being in the healthcare system as a patient for many years.

Nursing school also introduced me to science and in a much deeper way.

You know, I loved chemistry in high school, but that was really the only non-humanities class that grabbed me.

So nursing challenged me in a way that writing never had.

I had to work hard for it, especially the math part.

Then in my early twenties, I medically retired from nursing and through a series of events, I ended up back in writing, this time through the doorway of screenwriting.

Now this was a new form I had to learn and struggle with and make choices about scenes, dialogue, pacing, structure, what belonged on the page and what stayed in my head.

It was a really great way to master the infamous writing rule that many authors know of show, don't tell.

And somewhere in there, with words and stories shooting out of me like a geyser, I finally got it.

Being a writer isn't just a random talent I have.

It's who I am.

Talent can sit on a shelf.

Identity follows you around.

You can ignore it, build a different career, get busy, decide something else is more practical, and yet it will still be there, tapping its little foot, waiting for you to acknowledge it.

When I eventually built a writing business and turned this whole thing into a career, I developed a very different relationship with writing.

I started treating it as a skillset instead of some magical ability I'd been handed as a kid.

I took great joy in working at it, studying it, self-assessing, and pushing it into new forms.

My reason for writing has never been an easy answer.

It was more of a distillation of talent, science, creativity, identity, and finally returning to something I'd once taken for granted.

Now your reason, those of you who are writers, may be completely different.