Why I Write: Part Three

In which I conclude.

So then, in the previous two essays, we’ve learned that laziness and ego both had a part in determining why I’d become a storyteller of some sort. Call those the fun bits of the story. Now here’s the rest.

Telling stories is what we do — all of us. No matter what our profession, storytelling is a part of it. In fact, I challenge you to name any activity that doesn’t include some degree of storytelling as a part of it. A lawyer creating a client’s will tells the story of what the client wants to have happen after he dies, telling it in a way the courts and customs of his community will accept. An architect has told the story to the contractor, of how the Miller family wants their new house built, or the house doesn’t get built. A truck driver, who works alone and has no interest in spinning tales, whose only concern is in getting his goods from Point A to Point B, better have his trip log filled out and in order, in case the police pull him over to legally demand the story of what he’s hauling, where he’s going, where he came from, and how he went about getting there so far.

As I proposed in another essay — I think it was the introduction I wrote for one of the Fables collections — we should not be scientifically classified as Homo Erectus, meaning the people who stand erect. Sure, we do that, but that’s hardly what makes us unique as an animal. Bears and various apes stand erect. So do monkeys, lizards, insects, and other varmints, at least for periods of time.

We should be called Homo Fabulous, the storytelling people, because in that we are indeed unique in the world. No one who matters will listen to me, but I officially propose that we consider changing that right now, before too many school children learn the incorrect, less unique, less elegant term.

So that’s why I write. Since we’re all in the business of telling stories, I wanted to strip away the extraneous bits and get to the purest craft of telling stories I can manage. Why add in all of that extra stuff that comes with the other professions?

And, I want to tell any sort of story that it interests me to tell. Too many professions require narrowly defined storytelling, which thwarts my wide-ranging array of passions. A flight instructor should mainly confine his storytelling to discussions of how to fly this aircraft, or else he might not be the best flight instructor you can spend your money, your time, and (possibly) your life on. And so on.

I write because I can. I’ve worked for most of my sixty-plus years to get better at it, and I think (in fits and starts, with many mistakes along the way) I’ve gotten pretty good at telling the kinds of stories I like telling. It doesn’t bother me that there are an uncountable number of stories I’m no good at telling, because there are other storytellers out there, in abundance, and they’re doing the stories I don’t want to. All together we more or less have everything covered.

I also write because I read. Like most writers I read voraciously. I’ve met more than one writer who doesn’t much like reading, and, to be diplomatic, their stories tend not to be of the highest quality. “Beware the writer who writes more than he reads,” Harlan Ellison once said, and while I think it’s enough to avoid them, rather than beware them, I get his point.

Much of what I choose to write is done to fill the (tiny) gaps I’ve noticed in other books. I love what all these writers did in this tiny niche of this genre, except that none of them quite did this one thing. So I guess I’ll have to do a story that includes that one thing.

Now then, having concluded this extended lecture on why I write, we can finally move on to the important bit: Why do you write? What will you write? What gaps will you fill?