Why I Write

  Several weeks ago, my good friend Abigayle Claire wrote a post about What Keeps Her Writing, and I thought it was such a cool idea, so I stole it for today.

 I wrote my first book at the age of 8. It was a ten-chapter masterpiece (with illustrations) all about myself, my two best friends at the time, and our horses. Horses were always my first love, my first passion, but stories were and are a close second. I loved reading them so much, devouring every Pony Pal and Saddle Club book I could find at the school library, and I guess one day I decided to write my own?

  Of course this first book was absolute garbage, but we all have to start somewhere, and for me, that was with Horse Crazy Kids: Camp Pony. I don't even want to look at it anymore, because the cringe is TOO HIGH, but it was a great stepping stone that led me to where I am today. One book published and beloved by friends and family, and others on the way!

  I couldn't tell you when or where I made the decision to write books as a career. For most of my young childhood, I had wanted to do something with horses someday. As I got older, I realized that horses weren't the best way to make money, and decided that I would be an artist instead, because the job of an artist is obviously so much more lucrative, lol. I ran into the same problem there, around age 12, and so I turned to the third thing I was really passionate about: stories.

  I was thirteen when I got into The Lord of the Rings for the first time, and I can honestly say it changed my life. I have an obsessive personality, and I fell head over heels for this world and this story. I could go on and on about the beauty and truth I saw reflected in Tolkien's work, of how it helped to sate my deep personal longing for the "other worlds" and "something more" of my imagination. This world of beauty, and danger, and tragedy, and humanity so deeply reflects reality in a way that is almost more real totally captured my heart and mind. Thus sending me down the rabbit hole of writing.

  Tolkien talks a lot about the idea of humans being "sub-creators" under our own Creator, and how writing is an expression of that. We create because we were created. And I wholeheartedly agree with him. I have felt this desperate urge to create all my life, whether through childhood imaginary games, drawing and painting, singing, decorating and building, or writing my own stories. This is what being a creative is all about. At thirteen, inspired by Tolkien and his Middle Earth world, I began my proper journey into writing, world-building, and creating through story with a renewed vigor. I have been writing my own epic fantasy since I was eleven years old. I am currently 3/4's of the way through the second installment, which isn't much in the grand scheme of the story, but I'm so proud of it. I have seen this story through a million changes and upheavals and it keeps growing more and more amazing - in my opinion. I can't wait to share it someday.

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right

(used or misused). The right has not decayed.

We make still by the law in which we're made.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

  Aside from the ability to be a sub-creator, writing has given me the freedom to explore aspects of myself and of people in the world that we don't always get to see. The darkness, the what-ifs, the tragedies, the glories, all the human condition known and seen through scenes in my own head. Humans have this amazing gift of story, which enables us to see someone's struggles and empathize, to understand their pain and feel for them deeply. This is a beautiful aspect of humanity, and largely what makes us human at all. The ability to feel for each other, to hear another's story and share their joy and their suffering, to feel everything. That is so unique and amazing, and even more so to be able to create that experience for people.

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”

― Joss Whedon

  Particular to writing and consuming the fantasy genre, is the draw of other worlds, which I believe resides deep down in all of us, a residual affect of being spiritual beings and not just physical. Whether we experience this through story, through the feeling of wanderlust, through the nostalgia of past memories, the poignant beauty of a painting or note of music, we have all felt it.

"In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

  This longing that CS Lewis speaks of is something I have all my life been so prominently aware of, a longing so poignant, so specific, so hard to satisfy, and yet, there are so many beautiful things in the world that echo it, that put it to rest for a brief moment in time. And yet, it is only the thinly veiled Reality itself that can truly satisfy.

  “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” 

― C.S. Lewis

  These are the reasons I began to write, and continue to write all these years later. And, I suspect, these will be the reasons I am still writing, decades from now, hunched over a desk, a thousand elegant memories thick in my mind as I pour out my human experience, my aspect of Reality itself, onto the page once again.