Sunday Salon: Why This Reader Writes

I started a 10-week online writing workshop at the end of September, and I may occasionally post some of my assignments here. Our first task was to answer four questions in 15 minutes:

• Who are you?
• Why do you write?
• What are your best hopes for your writing?
• And what are your worst fears?

My Official Online Biography says that I work with numbers but love words. I think that captures who I am as a writer--first, I’m a reader. I don’t see how anyone who isn’t a reader can be a writer.

Writing is my means of making sense of my thoughts. I have no real confidence in my spoken self-expression--I stumble over words, I keep people waiting, I lose my train of thought, I get nervous talking and that makes all the other things worse. When I write, I can take the time to compose how I put the words out there, which helps me to compose the thoughts that are (theoretically) behind them. And I don’t get interrupted. I think it’s the flow that I like. I’m more articulate in long form, and more comfortable about how that comes out when I can see the words, and revise them, before I make them public.

My best hopes for my writing are that it helps me make connections. I’d like to know that I’m not the only one with these thoughts or feelings or ideas, and putting them out where other people might find them and respond to them is how I can learn that. I’d love to get to a place where it makes me some money as well as connections, but that’s literally TOO much to hope for at this stage in my life, when I have to make a full-time living doing the working-with-numbers thing. In that respect, my best hope for my writing would be for my husband to win the lottery (I don’t buy tickets, but he always does). Then we could both quit our jobs, and I could pursue writing--even for money--without NEEDING to make money at it.

My worst fears are that I stop--or am somehow forced to stop--putting my words on the page and putting them out there. My overall worst fear is the early-onset Alzheimer’s that took my mother from our family way too soon (and the closer I get to her age when her symptoms started, the sooner it feels) will come for me and take away my ability to collect my thoughts and my words. I believe that one of the reasons writing and reading matter so much to me is that they help keep my brain engaged and occupied and working to learn and process new things. If that helps ward off Alzheimer’s--and I don’t know if anyone knows that for sure, but it probably does?--then I NEED to write, literally for my own mental health.

These are my answers. Bloggers are writers. What are your answers?

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