Why do I edit and write?

Writing is important. It’s an outlet for me and millions of others who need to express their feelings, share their experiences and solve problems. Writers create beauty, tell stories they made up, and teach, entertain and delight readers. Writing influences people, to improve their lives, to reach for the stars, to plumb the depths of the ocean, to learn how to communicate with animals and with aliens.

Writers are possibly the original influencers.

You cannot go 2-3 days without hearing a reference to Maya Angelou, Shakespeare or Plato or MLK. Writers synthesize ideas, words and feelings into language. We make up stuff from what we hear and see around us, and it becomes important to people. They learn, they understand, they grow, they teach, they find meaning.

Writing is a time machine. Something someone wrote 500 years ago can still be checked out of the library. Aristophanes’ plays depict human nature from thousands of years ago that resonates today.

Books are records of those who lived, died and meant something to a family, to the world. When our bones are dust in the wind, there is the chance that our story will live on, or a story that we held dear will still exist for someone in the future.

I’ve had grown-ups and writers and readers and thinkers reach back for me and pull me up and over closer to them so I could hear and see and read what they have read and heard.

I feel that it’s a duty to share that with people who have the same desire—to join in the worlds made of words and vie for one little piece of immortality, perhaps.

Why do I write, edit and teach? I do this work because I excel at it. Somewhere over the years, I got good at it. I scribbled in notebooks, I read hundreds of books, I learned to type and tapped out pages of stories, that today we call “fan fic.”

It feels good to sort things out for myself through words. It feels perhaps even better to help someone find their tongue and hold their own book in their hands.

Human brains have only a few ways to take in and store information. The senses—sight, taste, touch, hearing, smelling—AND language. Words, reading, writing, speaking.

I do this work because it makes my brain happy, and I know I can help others make that connection for themselves.

Tell me why you write...