Please join me in congratulating the first place winner of our annual writing contest, Henry Gasko! For me, this is one of the best articles on writing I have ever read and I find it more than worthy of first place. For such a short post, it sure packs a wallop. Henry will inspire you to pick up that pen of yours and write something that matters, to you.
I hate writing.
I hate the fact that sometimes I do it to just impress my friends. I hate that I sometimes do it because it’s the only way an old man might, belatedly, become noticed by the world. And sometimes I do it from simple habit, to hide the fact that today I have nothing else to do and so I will write, even though I have nothing much to say.
But all the books say to do it anyway. They say that if I practice diligently enough for long enough, something consequential will magically appear. And so I do it, even though I suspect that I am merely getting faster at writing rubbish.
I hate the self-doubt that overcomes me every time I sit down and try to get some good words on the screen. Not just any words. Some good words. Hemingway killed himself when the right words would no longer come. I hate that I don’t have that kind of courage.
And, no, I can’t write about just anything and pretend it matters. Not about hard-boiled detectives with surnames that you remind you of guns or minerals, or secret agents who are practically super-heroes. And certainly not dragons or elves or vampires or zombies. I hate the fact that I can’t write about these fantasies. I just physically can’t. If I could, if I would embrace escapism and fantasy and magical realism and all the other ways of hiding from the reality of this world, and I would have a million plots available to me. None of them would reflect the world I live in but that wouldn’t matter. I could pretend that somehow — metaphorically or allegorically — they did.
But I am seventy years old, and have tried all those escapes, and I can’t do it. I can’t embrace the certain victories that always occur realms such as Mordor or Hogwarts, or the safely externalized demons of The Overlook. If there are demons in the world, they cannot be out there, they must be in here.
But, just maybe, if I write often enough and long enough, a few words might come that explain why my life is worth living, words that might answer the only question that really matters: “Why bother.”
And then I would have something that I would show my children and my grandchildren. And I could look back on my life without the creeping depression of a life unfulfilled, and I could look forward to my death knowing that I have left a valuable gift, however small, for my children.
That’s why I write.
