Why

One of the things I’ve noticed since I decided to take on the public persona of an author / writer / guy who tries to get paid for scribbling words onto paper is that people tend to ask the same series of questions when they find out what you do.  Usually they go something like this:

1)     What else do you do?

2)     No seriously, you’re really a writer?  How long have you been doing this?

3)     What kind of stuff do you write?

4)     What kind of novels do you write?

5)     Do you sell a lot of books?

Of course in my case you can also add in “What’s your blog about?”  I’ve found that it didn’t take but about two weeks and I had developed a rather pat form of responses. 

1)     Yes I’m seriously a writer.  Do I look like my male modeling career worked out?

2)     I’m a fiction writer, mainly novels, and I also write a blog.  I’ve been writing since I was about ten.

3)     I write modern fiction across several different genres that usually focus on what happens when seriously damaged people impact each other’s lives.

4)     I’ll let you know what my blog’s about as soon as I figure it out myself.  I usually just rant and rave about things that annoy me and people seem to like it.

5)     My books will be available for sale beginning late March.  Give me your email address or subscribe to my blog and I’ll make sure you know when they’re available.

These questions are all well and good.  To me they are no more involved than the inane questions you get asked at a dinner party or when you make a new professional acquaintance.  However, I had a really interesting experience a few days ago where I encountered a fairly educated man who happens to be the owner of a local gun store.  We were discussing the nuances of the firearm industry and swapping a few stories in the usual gregarious male fashion when he paused and asked me if he could ask me a question.  I told him by all means and he asked me the best question I’ve been asked yet:

“Why?  Why choose to be a writer?”

It just so happens that at this moment, and to be truthful for the majority of this past week, I’m in the process of completing my first book for publication, The Bounce at the Bottom, which is in reality my second novel.  To be completely honest I’m fighting with a bit of writer’s block and a motivational issue as well.  Any time I find myself fighting with these little demons I ask the very same questions my new friend asked me the other day.  My response to him was a quip to the effect of when I had it figured out I would let him know.  The truth, however, might be a little harder to comprehend and the more I analyze it and roll it over and over in my mind, the more I come back to a really simple truth that is actually fairly disturbing.

Why choose to be a writer? 

Honestly, I don’t think I have a choice.

Now before the ten of you who actually read this blog take turns laughing at me or collectively take a deep breath before ripping me a new one for being some self-important, melodrama ridden, affectation driven artiste who needs to be taken down a peg, hear me out.

First, there have been two periods of my life when I did not write at all.  The first was during my second year of college where my creative efforts were focused more into the conquest of the opposite sex.  The second was during the latter portion of my marriage to my ex-wife who felt and would occasionally vocalize the fact that writing was a waste of time and I really had no talent for it anyway.  It should also be noted that I count both of those periods as among the most miserable I have ever been in my life.

Secondly, and this may take a little bit of a leap of faith to understand and I hope you will come along with me on this, I think that creative people’s brains may work a little differently than those who do not feel the Muse’s pull.  I have friends who are extremely talented musicians who complain sometimes that they cannot get a tune out of their heads even though they’ve never heard it before.  A painter may dream of an image to the point of distraction until they finally put brush to canvas.  I’ve even talked to other authors that I know very well and they will admit that sometimes a project will become so fascinating to them that they can’t seem to get it out of their heads until it’s done.  For me, I have to say that once a story or a character gets in my head the only and I do mean the ONLY way it’s going to go anywhere is to get it on paper.

Allow me to illustrate in detail, if you will, what the experience of being a writer is like for me.  About eighteen to twenty-four months ago a friend of mine introduced me to this little band named Halestorm.  Being somewhat of a metal monkey, I was instantly hooked.  One of Halestorm’s songs from their most recent album is entitled “Innocence.”  The very first time I heard the opening hook of this song it grabbed my attention.  Something about this song seemed to haunt me.  I found myself listening to it over and over for the next week.  Trust me when I say that my fiancé and friends were growing rather annoyed with my suddenly limited choice in music, to say the very least.  One morning as I was driving to work I had this image of a man sitting in the crow’s nest of a beach house hearing this song coming from a beach bar across the harbor from his home.  I must have listened to the openening thirty seconds of that song fifty times in a row to try to clear up the image in my head.  Nearly a year later I heard the song again and suddenly I had another image of this guy pulling up to the beach bar in a boat and watching this local band, fronted by a distractingly beautiful lead guitarist, shred this song on a throw together stage as a storm started to threaten the beach.  I spent the next two days trying to get a rough idea of who these people were and within two more days I had twenty pages written as a treatment story to see if the idea worked.  Six months later I have a full story map / outline written and about eighty pages complete with an anticipation of three hundred total pages by the end of the year.  That is essentially the story of how I got the idea for Hurricane Carolina.

The sad thing about the story I just told you is that it is in no way the first time this has happened to me.  I find inspiration in music constantly and I have so many story fragments and character ideas jotted down in random notebooks and 2kB word files that I truly have lost count.  Somehow I seem to find a use for most of them as time goes on, interestingly enough.  Believe it or not I found a notebook the other day from back in High School that had both a character idea that will work perfectly in the new book and a fairly long short story that I might just be able to turn into a book at some point.  I’ve been a manager for ninety-five percent of my professional career since college but it turns out that I’ve been a writer for over twenty-five years now.  Who knew?

You know, there is one thing about being a writer or for that matter being in a creative field whatsoever I would wager makes it worth all the obsession and focus and abject distraction that a really great idea can cause.  That one simple thing is that you never know when that next idea is going to hit nor do you know where it’s going to come from, period.  Case in point:  if you had come to me a year ago and told me I was going to write a book about a foul mouthed misogynist whose ego and libido get him into one misadventure after another and that everyone I have sent test chapters to has loved the story I would have laughed at you with every fiber of my being and asked what you were drinking and why you weren’t sharing.  Yet all it took was one glass of whiskey, one decent cigar, a douche bag neighbor in a white fedora hat and a Rolling Stones song and the rest will come out in March for public consumption, judgment, and quite possibly ridicule.

So there it is, my little guided tour of the mind of a writer.  Do I have a better answer for my new friend’s question of why write to start with?  Not in the slightest.  I promised him I’d get back to him one day with the answer.  Maybe I’ll figure it out in time to use it as a clever little witticism to use when signing his copy of my book.