Confessions of a Written-Word Addict

For me it is either write or die.

I grew up on Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact. (I trust everybody remembers the Electric Company.) Somewhere between my mom and my television friends I learned to read and write before pre-school. In fact, I do not remember ever not knowing how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. It was just one of those things I could do that I figured everybody else could.

By the time I was in kindergarten I was writing humorous little stories for all my friends with plots, characters, and scenery to my teacher’s utter amazement. Of course, some twenty-five years later I do not remember what those stories were about. I imagine they weren't structured correctly or anything like that, but what would you expect from a five-year old. What I do remember is how it made me feel to be able to affect people with words on a page.

I remember being singled out from the class in first grade, and instead of us reading from the approved books, my teacher would have me stand in front of the class and read from whatever story I had made up that week.  My classmates would all have assignments to dissect whatever inner meaning there was to be found in my little narratives as if it were a timeless classic like See Spot Run. The adrenaline rush from being seen as someone special was a charge  my vocabulary was too limited to describe. Like with most memories, you rarely remember all the details rather you always remember the way it made you feel. I suppose if everybody had gotten as excited about my multiplication skills, I would be locked in my room most days working on private Quantum Physics projects or some such these days.

I continued to write regularly, right through college. Then all of a sudden, I just stopped. I got too busy I guess. The real world can be a bugger. You have responsibilities, commitments, less and less free time.

Soon I was a husband and father of two, living not too far from my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. But things were not right as rain for me. I would find myself sullen and depressed for no apparent reason. I have a great wife who loves me dearly. Two very smart healthy kids. A somewhat satisfying job that paid me an inordinate amount of money compared to the amount of actual “work” involved. Everything should be great, but it wasn’t.

So I started doing what I do to figure things out, write. Talk therapy is virtually useless for me. I read that Kurt Vonnegut advised young writers to “write the way they speak”. For me that doesn’t work so well, because for one I hardly ever talk at all. Can’t help it, I am just not a chatterbox. For two, the way I speak has very little to do with me and a lot more to do with who I am talking to…..

(Side bar: You see what just happened there. As I am writing this, I just realized perhaps the reasoning in Mr. Vonnegut’s advice. Don’t you always write for an audience, even if it is yourself. And if it is yourself who you are writing for, wouldn’t you write something you would want to read. This follows right into another piece of advice attributed to Mr. Vonnegut. See proof positive, I think well when I am writing.)

The things I wrote at the time seemed to have every little to do with me. Instead, they turned out to be any combination of random thoughts, observations, or in some cases random word assortments that gave the appearance of sentences.  However, the experience was relieving and relaxing. That’s when I realized. My brain for years had been programmed to write. Regardless of whether there was someone to read my writings or if anybody ever saw them, I was physically incapable of living without writing. In some ways it’s a curse. But the headaches quickly went away, and I stopped missing work.

So, there it is. Writing for me is more cathartic involuntary muscle spasms like…well…sexual eruption. In short, as a kid I wrote for others attention, now I write because I can’t help it. God has a way of getting you to do what he (or she very well could be a she, but we are not going to debate that this time) wants. In my case, it’s Write or Die.