Write Something

I need to write something. It always makes me feel better.

I wonder why that is. I’m under no illusion that it’s going to change the world, or even anyone’s mind. So why bother?

It’s like walking or running. I do it to stay healthy. It exercises my emotional muscles and keeps them strong and flexible.

My writing career started briefly, a punnish way to say I was a lawyer. I hated briefs, actually. Too much research, too many citations, so I moved over into transactional law, where I could write to be persuasive, relying largely on creativity and logic. 

Later, picking up on the fictions of my lawyer days, I started writing novels. Don’t rush out looking for them, they’re still finding their way. One of them will make it over the finish line one day.

In the meantime, it would be easy to get discouraged and throw in the towel. I’ve decided that the reason I haven’t must be that although I write hoping for readers, it is the process itself, not the prospect of engaging others, that brings me back for more.

Sometimes I don’t know what I think about something until I write about it. There is a crisp clarity about the written word, as well as a permanence, that commands that it be produced carefully, thoughtfully. (Let’s leave social media out of this, shall we? Nothing wrong with it, but not the kind of writing I’m talking about.)

To put it differently, a character portrayal is a merciless critic. Even as the thoughts are formed and go onto the page, their virtues and flaws jump out at me. Conversation, on the other hand, is shape shifting and ephemeral. In its inherent give and take, it is self correcting. And what was said is gone as soon as the hearer walks away, unless like a seed eaten by a bird it is pooped out over a patch of welcoming soil and takes root and grows, and even then it will never be more than a random tree in a forrest, which I suppose is better than being a random manuscript in a desk drawer, but not much.

So, back I go, hurling myself into the breach. I haven’t decided what the story will be this time. Or maybe I have. I always seem to write some version of a father-son story featuring a tortured relationship that leads to tortured relationships. There are plenty of those to go around these days.