why write

TadMack has posted some lovely ruminations on why she writes. A snippet:

People have always starved, it's endemic to poverty -- the poor we always have with us, after all -- but things have been drifting quietly downstream for some time now, and in the distance is the roaring sound of the rapids.

Common sense suggests that paddling this canoe now won't even slightly delay our rush toward white water, but that's not why I'm still writing -- I'm writing because I believe in the power of stories.

Go and read the whole thing. Really. She writes very eloquently about questions I've often asked myself, that I know many of my friends have asked themselves.

On my dinner break I was mulling over this whole business of trying to sell my book, wondering why it's so darn important to me. This book in question is a middle grade novel about two girls falling in like. I remembered last year, when I was beginning to send it out--how when I told some of my lesbian friends about it, they said, "Wow. I wish there'd been a book like that when I was twelve."

And just like that, I remembered: Oh, yeah. That's why this is important. That's why I want this book to make its way out into the world, instead of being forever trapped on my computer. Because of all the twelve-year-olds who wish there was a book like that, for all the people who look back on twelve and wish they'd had that book. That's why, as my agent starts sending it out, I've got all my fingers and toes crossed as much as fingers and toes ever were.

I've mentioned before what a great extemporaneous speaker Stephen Fry is. This morning I enjoyed his latest "podgram," entitled "Wallpaper."

After some initial meandering, Fry settles in, with his usual eloquence and beautiful, sonorous voice, to discuss Oscar Wilde and his critical involvement in the aesthetic movement.

Fry summarizes aestheticism as viewing the world not in terms of good versus evil, but rather beautiful versus ugly. Nature with its sunsets, its snowy peaks, its fantastic flora and fauna, is beautiful; all ugliness in the world is due to the interference of humankind. But if we view ourselves as only able to mar Nature's perfection, unable to create anything beautiful of our own, hopelessness sets in. What is to stop us, to loosely quote Fry, from crapping in our own nests? That is why, when Oscar Wilde said Americans were so violent because our wallpaper was ugly, he was not simply making a flippant remark.

Recently I was involved in a discussion with other writers about why we write. This was my basic argument: that in writing, as in any other pursuit, you have to believe you have something to offer, some improvement to make (no matter how infintessimal), or you might as well give up—on life, on everything. I believe writing is one way humankind can make the world more beautiful. Writing might also be moral or utilitarian, but in the case of novels, at least, I'm with the aesthetes: I believe their main purpose is to be enjoyed. And I believe the act of writing itself is a way of seeking the truth, making sense of the world from all its clamor—to quote Wildes's "Hélas!":

Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God...

And though scholars disagree on the precise meaning of the final lines of aesthetic forerunner John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," I'll twist them to my own aesthetic ends by concluding thusly:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at The Well-Read Child!

At the library, I'm often asked for reading suggestions that fall under the heading of "bibliotherapy"—in other words, books to help kids through a tough time. Some topics, such as the death of a loved one, coping with bullying, or beginning school are very well-covered. Others, particularly on "less universal" situations, are hard to come by.

For example, last month I was reviewing my library's picture book collection for books about various medical problems and/or disabilities. I believe it was Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children that recently published an extensive bibliography on everything from ADHD to lactose intolerance to Crohn's disease. I was surprised how few of the recommended titles were trade publications. A great many appeared to be essentially self-published by hospitals, nonprofit organizations, and even individuals. Of these, the few that managed to snag a review in one of the journals tended to get pretty atrocious reviews. The stories were described as didactic, the writing and illustration inferior to that which is published in trade. But when the alternative is no book at all, what's a parent to do? Likewise, if I were a writer with a book on one of these topics and couldn't find a publisher who'd take it, wouldn't I rather self-publish than do nothing at all?

A picture book topic not quite as overlooked in these years of war is parents and family members working overseas in the military. Several have been published in the past four years. Our library owns the following:

• The Impossible Patriotism Project, by Linda Skeers
• My Red Balloon, by Eve Bunting
• Red, White, and Blue Good-Bye, by Sarah Wones Tomp
• Love, Lizzie: Letters to a Military Mom, by Lisa Tucker McElroy
• When Dad's at Sea, by Mindy L. Pelton
• While You Are Away, by Eileen Spinelli

But while books like these can help families cope, I believe there is no one book that will ever say everything that needs to be said in a specific situation. We get that all the time with the death bibliotherapy questions—"But don't you have a book about a little boy's special relationship with an older babysitter who moves to Indiana and then gets cancer and passes away?" Nobody can tell your story like you can.

Yesterday's Salon.com article Once Upon a Time, Dad Went to War touchingly addresses just this conundrum. A mother writes how no book she found, published in trade or self-published, gave her children the message they needed to hear. Her solution: to write a simple, stapled, sticker-covered book just for them.

"Why do you write?" seems to be a popular interview question for authors, but it's always struck me as a little dumb. There may be different things playing into a writer's decision to devote a good chunk of their life to setting words down on paper, but I think ultimately it always comes down to feeling like you have something to say and wanting to say it your way. That goes for writers whose books about potty-training are published by big houses, writers who self-publish a book for kids about IBS, and writers who hand-write a story to comfort their children while Dad's away at war.