On Writing

I went to the Mississippi Book Festival last weekend, and it was glorious! I laughed with the writers on the Southern humor panel, listened to Ann Patchett tell me funny stories for an hour and got re-tweeted by Joyce Carol Oates. (I am so not kidding.)

But one moment at a panel on debut novels really struck me. There were three panelists talking about writing, and particularly about writing their first novels, all of which had been recently published. Once the Q&A began, I raised my hand. I noted that the world was filled with millions of books, and with also lots of people who would like to have written a book. I asked them what motivated them to write their own book, to be driven enough to stick with it and see it through to completion.

Each of the three authors gave very different and very interesting responses. I'm recording them here so I don't forget them.

The first novelist said that she's always writing, and that she always needs to be writing. She says she writes lots of material that never sees the light of day - she never shows it to anyone, and certainly no one ever publishes it. She writes it because she needs to, and the byproduct of that is that sometimes she ends up with something that gets published.

The second novelist noted that, in life, things just happen to her and her friends - good things, bad things. Things just happen. But in a novel that she controls, she can take the things that happen and impose meaning on them - how they unfold, why, what the outcome is. She finds something satisfying in creating meaning in the world of the book or story she's writing.

The final author noted that he was a lawyer. He had a great job that paid well. He had a loving family that he was able to take care of and spend time with because of his work as a lawyer. He added that at first, he often asked himself why he was spending thousands of dollars to sit in a creative writing class at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday night so he could be a writer. But then he said that he loved the act of writing. And he also said that he would be proud and pleased that if, when he died, the word "author" could be included on his tombstone.

I found each of these answers to be so different and so true. What motivates each of us is unique and complex, and thinking about how all the books in the world make their way into being is fascinating.

Happy reading *and* writing!