I Write Because ...

I write because I'm meant to. It's the only explanation I have. I have no justification for doing it. I can't trace it back to some childhood happening. No one in my family is a published writer, though some of them do write. They never share their writing like I do. I just know that I have the jumbled stuff of stories bouncing through my thoughts constantly. Each strives to hold my attention long enough to form themselves into complete tales. Sometimes I can shut them out and not listen, but they always manage to catch me at a peaceful moment and spill over to conscious thought.

For years I didn't write them down. I just kept the best ones and forgot the rest like dream sequences that fade away in the morning light. Then one day when I was nine, I wrote one down. God, but I was slow and couldn't keep up with the tumble of ideas. The words just wouldn't describe the pictures and the voices... Well, I tried to summarize the dialogue. What a horrible effort. It was so bad and so far from what was winding itself out in my head that I cried. I got better though never perfect. Then when I was sixteen, I quit trying. I didn't try again until I was 33. What a relief to find that I was better at capturing them than before.

I have this odd habit of breaking off in the middle of a conversation or suddenly stopping what I'm doing and staring off into space. When I'm caught I usually say "I was just thinking." People who know me learn very quickly that if they wait patiently I'll be back as suddenly as I'd departed. I never volunteer what I was thinking about and they never ask. What they think about this odd habit they're too polite to tell. Oh my, if they only knew that the little motion made with their hand, or the color of their lipstick, or the delicious sound of that word that just slid off their tongue, had sparked such an amazing and wonderful story.

Sometimes I can savor them slowly, and sometimes they demand to be shared. Other times I can't get to a computer fast enough. And more rarely, they are almost painful in their need to burst free and I would do just about anything for a pencil or pen.

Each character is me and not me. Each story is my story and someone else's. Some are what I think or feel and some are not me at all and I have no idea how they got in my head. Do I have talent? Does it matter? I write because I was meant to, because the stories insist I do, and because they're too good not to try to tell.