The Purpose of Writing

This rather snarky piece was what I submitted as my aesthetic statement for my final project in the English program at CSUN. It has been about 5 months since I turned this in, and although some of my opinions and feelings on certain subjects have shifted since then, the core sentiments have stayed the same. It's always important to ask yourself, "WHY do you do what you do?"

The Purpose of Writing

Imagine, if you will, that you’re sitting in a bar on a particularly slow Friday night, blowing off some steam after a long week of the old nine-to-five. You’re absentmindedly sipping your rum and Coke when some ballsy fellow casually saunters up to the stage, full of whiskey and confidence, itching to take a crack at the open mic. Before he cues the sound guy to start the karaoke track, he decides to tell a joke to lighten the mood and get the audience into it. All eyes are on him. He begins, “Hey folks, you’ll never guess what I saw today…” He goes on about something a lady did in a supermarket which he found amusing, and right when he finishes the last word of the punchline, he is met by silence. Dead silence. The crickets aren’t even chirping. The bartender has actually stopped wiping off glasses to stare at this guy blankly. The guy’s face droops solemnly, as if it were made of wax and the stage lights were slowly melting away his enthusiasm. He proceeds to deliver the worst rendition of “Don’t Stop Believing” you’ve ever heard, and after the first chorus you turn back around and ask for another round. The night goes on.

 That’s how I feel sometimes when someone asks me, “What do you plan to do with a writing degree?” As I fumble through my explanations, I suddenly feel like Bad Punch Line Guy.

I’ve been doing this writing thing for over two years now. If you were to ask me in freshman year of high school where I saw myself in the next five or six years, studying English would not be my first answer. As a kid, I had dreams of being a dentist so I could score all those free toys they give you after cleaning. When I got a bit older, I saw Jurassic Park on VHS and decided archaeology was the thing for me. Then I hit high school and shit got real. I studied animation and graphics design for the next four years, then seemingly threw away my chances at a real career by taking up music theory and composition in junior college only to fail entry auditions into CSUN’s music program twice. I bounced between a major in Communications or Creative Writing before settling on the latter, figuring that if I was going to get a degree in liberal arts I might as well make it for stuff I was already good at, which was creating art and thinking too much. Creative Writing seemed like a good fit for me.

It wasn’t until my first semester into the program that something zinged with me. Maybe it was the way that my mind was suddenly opened to new ideas and new way of thinking. Maybe it was the sheer amount of amazingly interesting books I was exposed to, from the Renaissance all the way up to Ben Loory. Or maybe it was the reality that what I discounted as merely “liberal arts” was in fact the very things that made life worth living. Art. Emotion. Wisdom. Fantasy. Liberation. After 6 months of steeping myself in books and theory, I was hungry for more. Over the next few semesters, I wrote stories and papers, participated in workshops and discussions, and read more books in two years than I ever did in the previous twenty-one years I had been alive. Nerdy was good. Smart was good. Clever and witty were good. And believe you me, I was very, very good.

I’m closing in on my final semester at CSUN. It’s been a pretty wicked and wild ride so far these past two years, and I’ve enjoyed every moment of it. But all throughout my academic sojourn, and even now, I’m incessantly hounded by those same goddamn questions, like a flies buzzing around my head. “Why do writing?” “What can you do with writing?” Or even worse, the short and emphatic response of “Oh, that’s nice.” You don’t even get a chance to explain yourself with that one; they’ve already made up their minds about you.

I’ve had to leaf through a few pages and really paw at my brain about this one. Why do we write?

I hang out with a group of guys that I’ve been friends with for years now. This eclectic ensemble is composed of people majoring or working in engineering, computer science, political science, and information technology. And then there’s me, the English major. As you can imagine, when it came to anything not involving video games or a movie we just saw together, it was rather difficult for everyone to stay on the same page, even more so for myself. “Hey guys, let’s all talk about this book I just read! Doesn’t that sound fun?” We love each other and are very respectful of each other, but when it comes to practical careers, their brutally honest opinions would probably rank my current path pretty low on that list. Bless their little hearts.

It was precisely that sort of social environment that really encouraged and motivated me to think about that haunting question. “Why do we write?” All our grade school English classes had nearly driven away our desire to even pick up a book of our own free will. We were burnt out on vocabulary exercises and spelling tests. And if there wasn’t a movie based on it, we sure as hell weren’t going to read it. So why bother writing?

I came upon the answer to that question years ago in high school, but I didn’t realize it until much, much later, during my final year at CSUN. One day, I was watching a TV show called Legend of Korra with the gang. It was one of those fantasy-type programs that was chock full of sorcery, exotic creatures, and epic adventures, just the sort of thing that gamer nerds like us would appreciate. There came a part where the villain attacked the heroes with a platoon of machines forged from platinum, and it was at this point that there was some dissent among our engineering friends. Apparently, platinum is so rare in our universe that there’s no feasible way one could mine up enough of it to make an entire army of combat machinery. Yes, despite all the magic and made-up monsters in the show, they drew the line at earth science. The show immediately lost all credibility as a work of entertainment because it violated an aspect of the real world that was ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

It was then that I recalled something I had read in junior year of high school, a book called The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien:

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

Not to sound like a total O’Brien groupie, but I carried that nugget of wisdom with me for a long time. It always seemed to echo itself during those moments where I sat down and asked myself, “What am I doing with my life? What good is writing? How is it any more important than math or science or business?”

I’ll admit, it is hard to justify it sometimes. There’s probably not much money to be made from it, unless you’re lucky. It’s tough to stand out and get noticed; writers are a dime a dozen, just like musicians. There’s more security and practicality in being a doctor or a scientist. Our society has been oriented towards technological progression and information accessibility. Where does the artist fit in to all that, and why do they matter? The simple answer is one that is not my own, but a quote: “Without art, the earth is just ‘eh.’” And it is true. What the writer may lack in practicality and wealth, he makes up for in enrichment and catharsis, in provoking and enlightening, in sharing and experiencing. Where would movies and TV shows and radio be without the artists? The very fabric of culture depends on us!

All materialistic thinking aside, the real answers required some honest-to-God soul searching. Why do I write? Why does Justin write? No matter how many times I asked myself that, it always came down to the same answer: I write because I’m a writer.

What does an artist do? An artist captures life and packages it in a way that is pleasing and memorable. The page is my canvas, the pen is my brush, and life is my muse. I write because it is something that is a part of us and all around us. Our lives are stories. Our experiences are stories. Our perceptions are stories. It breathes life into the stagnation and stillness of our existences. It causes us to look back, look around, and even turn away. It makes us feel. It makes us think. It makes us aware. I look back upon the times that have shaped me into who I am. Heartbreaks and break ups. Parties where I drank too much. Eavesdropping on the yelling and swearing that boomed outside my room. The wheels in my head turn. The hands start to move. The pen begins to scribble. All of sudden, those moments are transformed. Heart wisdom and growth. Laughter and jubilation. Lessons in love and family. The reader is right there with me. They can feel what I can feel. They see what I can see. And they can learn and grow, just like me.

O’Brien talks in length about how the story bears more truth, more brevity, than reality ever will. Stories outlive the moments that they draw from. Stories are recalled, recounted, remembered. Stories bring the dead back to life, and turn back the clocks. Stories keep alive the moments and memories and experiences that are otherwise lost to history. Often, story-truth is truer than happening-truth. If that is something that we can truly live by, then it important now more than ever that our stories continue to be scribed and told.

It is how we survive. It is how we thrive. It is how we live forever.