Reasons to Write

My rejections continue, so I am missing the mark on getting published. Why continue?

Personally, I keep writing because I think I am onto something. Take into account I might be delusional. 

Then there are the points made by Elisa Gabbert in her essay Why Write?.

William Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury five separate times, “trying to tell the story, to rid myself of the dream.” “It began with a mental picture,” he told Jean Stein in 1956, “of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree.” He couldn’t seem to get it right, to find the picture’s grammar, or hear it. (According to Didion, “It tells you. You don’t tell it.”) This was part of the work, this getting it wrong—Faulkner believed failure was what kept writers going, and that if you ever could write something equal to your vision, you’d kill yourself....

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There is often something compulsive about the act of writing, as if to cast out invasive thoughts. Kafka said, “God doesn’t want me to write, but I—I must.” Hughes wondered if poetry might be “a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of.” It’s the fear of discovery, then, that makes poems poetic, a way of telling riddles in the confession booth....

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Some writers write in the name of Art in general—James Salter for instance: “A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve.” Eudora Welty said she wrote “for it, for the pleasure of it.” Or as Joy Williams puts it, in a wonderfully strange essay called “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks,” “The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve … something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness—those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.” Is that somethingness the wraith, the shimmering go-between? Or a godlike observer? “The writer writes to serve,” she writes, “that great cold elemental grace which knows us.”

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...Writing isn’t hard the way physical labor, or recovery from surgery, is hard; it’s hard the way math or physics is hard, the way chess is hard. What’s hard about art is getting any good—and then getting better. What’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions and your finite brain.

 And what hits closest to my own feelings:

And when I’m thinking well, I can sometimes write that rare, rare sentence or paragraph that feels exactly right, only in the sense that I found the exact right sequence of words and punctuation to express my own thought—the grammar in the thought. That rightness feels so good, like sinking an unlikely shot in pool. The ball is away and apart from you, but you feel it in your body, the knowledge of causation. Never mind luck or skill or free will, you caused that effect—you’re alive!

I hate either/or situations - I once read they were totalitarian and since have come to think of them as signs of a narrow mind and/or poor planning - so please understand what follows is meant to be taken seriously: for me the choice is either to be creative or be destructive. I was destructive for far too long and being still alive means I need repay the debts from my destructive days.

sch 7/23/22