I have to admit I am writing this post to avoid what I had scheduled myself to write this morning. These days I have to block out time in my planner for every little thing I do. From the moment the family leaves for the day I must have a plan or else I end up waiting at the school bus stop at 3:30pm wondering why the hell I didn’t just watch soap operas all day – at least then I could say I did something.

The essay is for a contest sponsored by Editor Unleashed and Smashwords and the funny thing is the title of the essay is “Why I Write.” I know exactly why I write: Because I’d curl up and die if I didn’t. But a nine word sentence doesn’t win contests, no matter how emphatic or hyperbolic that sentence may be.

I have a page written and it’s pretty good. There’s a nice analogy flowing through it and some heart felt, universal truths. My writing group liked what I had written so far but I haven’t written a word since I read to them. I’m stuck. I can’t understand what’s stopping me. Is it fear that it’s not good enough? Or could it be that the subject, the question, although seemingly so simple, actually opens a well so deep that to describe it in 750 words is to merely peek over the edge?

To ask Why I Write is to ask who are you? what are you? what are you doing here on this planet?

That sounds a little dramatic, I know, but my life history has been a series of stepping stones leading up to this time when I have my name and words in print and time at home to make it happen. Do we choose our path or is it laid out for us and we just have to dig through the brush to discover it? (Big question! Too many tangents that could take us on.) What I know is I was born to put words down on paper and I feel as if I have no choice in that matter. I could never pick up my journal again, throw out my fountain pen, burn all the paper in the house and I would survive. Yes, I’d function. But I wouldn’t be whole. Unfulfilled. I wouldn’t understand or experience life or myself as well as I might. My potential would be gasping for air, struggling to live and I would atrophy into just a human machine. The “being” part of this human would have died.

And that is Why I Write.

And you?