You Can't Stop Writing

“What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses — like they’re trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?” – Jerry Seinfeld

“I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

Hello and welcome to Sitting in Silence. I’m your stalwart guide to writing craft, joy, worry, and joy. I hope you’re enjoying spring, the season of new love.

Announcements: in just over two weeks I’m teaching a fun online class called Craft Seminar: Introduction to Fiction Writing. If you have been aching to start new work, this is where you belong. I tend to keep it light and fun, so come along and bring your friends!

By the way, have you ever been to Maine? I have. It’s quite beautiful. And it’s even more beautiful because I’m teaching a class there called The Joy of Text. We’ll cover everything you need to know to write compelling stories and have them published. Spend your free time seeing the sights and replenishing yourself.

Furthermore, this very week you can find me in Chattanooga, TN at the South Word Literary Festival and the next week in Tallahassee, FL at the Word of South Literary Festival.

As always, welcome to new followers and thank you to premium subscribers who make Sitting in Silence possible. Premium subscribers have exclusive access to bonus features, including original posts and craft discussions.

Now, for today’s topic: You Can’t Stop Writing.

This morning, I woke up. In that space between dreaming and consciousness, I had one of those epiphanies that you only get when you don’t have all your defenses up. When you haven’t yet made yourself acceptable to proper polite society. When you haven’t allowed the wave of daily distractions to crash down upon you. This is a room adjacent to the last ten minutes of an intense therapy session or perhaps the sweet space you enter during meditation while on a country retreat.

I thought: if I wasn’t writing, I’d be creating something else. This is new for me because I’ve always considered my life options equal. I could practice law, or I could write novels. I could sell insurance, or I could teach poetry. But I think was fooling myself. I’ve had a lot of normie jobs in my life (summer camp counselor, waiter, bag boy, cashier [x2], salesman, government worker [x2], lawyer [x6], etc.) but none of them felt as vital as writing a paragraph I like. A paragraph like the one you’re reading now.

But it’s more than that. When I look back, I realize that at one time or another I’ve engaged in almost every art there is. When I was a pre-teen, I’d lay on the floor and draw figures for hours using my drawing compass and stencils. I doodled houses, dinosaurs, and cars in math class. (I was ahead of the time. My 1980s cars looked a lot like 21st century cars, all operatic curves and angles, unlike the box-shaped cars I grew up with). I started playing the violin in sixth grade and the double bass a year or so later. In high school, while playing bass in the orchestra, I was sometimes asked to perform my essays for the assembly of students. Once, I was somehow convinced to dance for a talent show. (I was a very large teen. Imagine one of the Fantasia hippopotamuses dancing to a 90s R&B song. That’s me.) By senior year in high school, I seriously considered showing up at Marvel Comics headquarters in Manhattan to beg for a writing internship. This was also the mid-90s when Marvel films like Spider-Man, X-Men, and even Blade were years away. I did speech and debate in law school and very minor acting roles throughout my 20s and 30s. When I was displaced during a hurricane, I bought a pawn shop electric bass and fell in love with it. I also took guitar lessons and spent a couple of years trying to start a band, which didn’t work out because in 2008 New Orleans wasn’t really an indie rock haven. I even have a good singing voice when I sing daily. For a split second, I was a poker player and for longer an elected official (not as exciting as it sounds), which I suppose are both forms of acting. Even the other week, at the urging of my friend and twin, the poet Karisma Price, I made a cute little zine. My first ever, I think.

I did most of these things in conjunction with my day jobs. I did them, in retrospect, because I couldn’t help myself. I did them because regular life wasn’t enough. The non-creative world was desert. The creative world was oasis.

What I’m trying to say is that some of us are built to make things. We’re better people when we create. We’re perhaps even happy when we create well. There are so many stories of people being closed off from their creative pursuits only to have that energy reignite in a new form. Dr. John, the New Orleans legend. injured his piano fingers and converted to guitar. And just as many stories of people who overcame deafness, blindness, or other supposed disabilities to master their forms. Consider here, Stevie Wonder, Andrea Bocelli, or Beethoven. Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels and dozens of short stories while severely affected by the lupus that took her young life at 39. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and many others did the best they could in the face of debilitating mental health challenges.

Of course, it’s not always a matter of overcoming physical and mental barriers. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you like literature, the reading and, maybe, writing of it. If you like writing and reading, you’re probably good at something else in the creative multiverse like fashion design or puzzle making or abstract painting.

In other worlds, you were made to love, and you were made to create. Very often those two areas are the same.