Why I Write

Fifth grade—12 years old—I am crouched like a tiger over a piece of gray lined paper, the kind of paper I would later learn was meant only for children, not aspiring revolutionaries as I was. I am with my best friend and we are writing and writing and writing, the words are pouring out of us like blood from a deep gash in our psyche. Though the characters and plot are dismissible, the wound that the graphite left scarred me with a love divine.

At twelve, that same year, I was the only child in the room to be writing poetry about drug usage and its adverse effects. I got in asinine amounts of trouble, yet I loved the vulgar words… I did not realize this until recently when I broke the moral shackles on my writing. I love the way swear words are provocative, as if beckoning the most moral to see just how God would damn it.

This perverse affectation of words and their flow is bred not of fifth grade slop, but of my hatred of writing. I am in a constant battle with words. Call me a perfectionist, but words are never enough. I am a visual person. To me, to see a headless, naked victim, bloated and contorted, is much more evocative than a thousand million words on the subject. But this talent is God-given. I cannot photograph the dead well and thus I write those thousand million words, attempting to describe the bloated skin and how the detached head is pale and cringing with its eyes open to a world it has left. I leave no word unturned for I am a writer, not an editor. I leave it then to them to butcher my convoluted million into these five: “The dead shall rise again.”

As I have noticed in reading books, minorities have written some of the greatest. There is Sula and Invisible Man by blacks and Joy Luck Club and No Name Woman by Asians. Certainly, Caucasians have grand books but they are all pulp. Huck Finn was just a kid and Gatsby was just a twisted idealist, hell bent on something he could never have. I want to be the first cracker, ofay, honky, to write the true white novel, able to contend with the greater novels of the minorities. But perhaps the great white novel will merely be more American Pulp.

It seems that if I were black, I could write like Douglass. But covering myself with shoe polish is not going to change my predicament. My situation is that somebody who occupied this self before hogged the riches. I am a very weak persona, and I must overcome it with questions that can only be answered through words, not pictures.

Just as the knife ran off with the spoon only to find out it was pregnant with the fork’s babies, I write. I reach a climax only to find out that I could write it better after I have finished—and a Didion-esque migraine ensues. Thus I was naïve to think that Orwell was a failure as a person he wrote imperfections. All writings are rough drafts but one must be sent up like the perfect sheep for the offering.

I write because I want to know the world for my knowledge is bleak. I know not of laughter, except that it is comforting. I know not of esthetics, except that they are appealing. I know not but a fraction of words, for my mind is too often closed. I write to fight the endless fight against this myopic world in hopes that it all comes crumbling down. My name may be of a great author, terrorist, or revolutionary, dependant on how one perceives change in prose. Perhaps I fight this fight because I lost to mathematics a very long time ago or perhaps because music inspires words. I love the mellow tones of my bass clarinet almost as much I love fighting with words. I fight with my instrument also: I have no devotion to it and I hate to take it out outside the context of the F building. Thus, to hate something often is to love it always and that is why I write.