Writing Chronicles: Why do I Write?

You sit sometimes for hours or days at a time struggling to squeeze every bit of creative juice into words. Then you take this word-juice pulp and try to blend it into some sort of readable smoothie of sentences hoping your readers develop a love for the flavor and come back for more.

The reader gets all of the benefits and the writer experiences something akin to torture.

Writing sucks.

Writing is hard.

Writing is tiring.

Some days I wake up and think, what am I doing?  I was going to be a meteorologist and then an Evangelical minister…and when that blew up, I decided to write? I blogged before this iteration of my blog but I don’t believe some of those old posts, and other posts are too caustic to allow continued public consumption. To be honest, the reason I went down this path is that several people suggested it to me. They meant religious writing, but I have decided to go down another path: writing fantasy novels. Doesn’t mean I won’t write religiously in the future, but for now, I am leaving that to the blog.

Chalk it up to my lifetime of playing video games with a fantasy focus, or reading the Wheel of Time series (and now many others), or my love of playing Dungeons and Dragons and watching great storytellers weave their yarns. All of these caused me to want to pursue writing fantasy.

Have I written stories before? Yes. Did they become whirling cyclones of interconnected chaos? Yes, yes they did. Sometimes I worry my new writing will end up the same, but to be honest “perspective-shifting” shows like Lost and 24 were in vogue with all the character and events being absurdly connected. It also did not help that my story was from an “end times” biblical perspective.

Why do I write?

Because I can. Yes, it is painful and some days I wonder if everyone judges me because I do not have a “real job.” My wife works in online education (for public schools) and she brings in enough for us to live comfortably. She has encouraged me to do this, especially since my life for the past two years has kind of been well…shitty.  I am learning so much from the books I read, the videos I watch, and the work I have put in. I have several projects I am working on, and the one I posted up earlier on Symphonia came from a writing exercise to help me not focus so much on worldbuilding, which ironically is something I now have to do if the project is to move forward. I get a lot of joy from writing even through the pain and grief it can cause.

Do I write every day? No, but I am getting to where I am writing most days. It is kind of like exercising, doing something is always better than doing nothing. I may not go full tilt every day, but I try to write something, anything because I am keeping my mind and heart fresh for the next day’s juicing session.

I enjoy the hell out of writing, so bring on the pain.

(Note: This has been severely disrupted by Minecraft as of 9/2/19)