"Why Write?", featuring Vernon Meidlinger-Chin

Hello! Another month has gone by, and with the end of the month comes another fantastic, insightful guest blogger. This month, it is our pleasure to introduce Vernon Meidlinger-Chin, a wonderful artist, writer, world-traveler, and all-around awesome human being. If you're looking for a fantastic, honest conversation about the world, art, and writing, he is your man. Like us, he is also invested in finding an artistic community full of creative types, so we were psyched when he agreed to write a piece for us. Without further ado, here is Vernon's wonderful article about why we write these days.

via nofilmschool.com.

Why Write?

So you’re at a party. Somebody brought spinach artichoke dip, so that’s where we find you. Good call there. A fellow you’ve never met before sidles up, samples the dip, and smiles. Your eyes meet, and you begin to chat – hello, what’s your name? Where are you from? Enjoying this weather? Enjoying this spinach artichoke dip? So what do you do?

He answers that last question quickly and gracelessly. He does something mundane but respectable and he asks the same question back to you. How should you respond? You consider saying, “I’m a student,” but that’s not quite right. You’ve graduated and you’re not entirely committed to a higher degree yet. You consider saying, “I’m between jobs,” but that’s not totally true either. You earn a wage taking odd jobs or working part-time shifts at such-and-such a place while you apply to better careers.

And before you know it, you blurt out the phrase that, though it describes you accurately, usually remains hidden. 

“I write,” you say.

“Oh,” says your new friend, who then says “oh” again in a slightly different tone before launching into the series of familiar questions: “What do you write?” “What are your goals as a writer?” and the kicker, “Why write?”

That last question is one that everyone who writes has to answer at some point. Perhaps you’ll have to explain yourself to a new acquaintance, or perhaps you pose the question to yourself on sleepless nights, memorizing the barely visible constellations of pockmarks on your ceiling, “Why write?”

What does it even mean to write? Everyone who has finished a first grade education is able to write (or let’s hope), but that doesn’t make the 7-year-old kind handing you a shopping list of only candy a writer. For the sake of this piece, and for the sake of letting you and I call ourselves writers, let us say that a writer is anyone who sends a significant amount of time regularly moving words about, arranging them to construct stories, essays, poems, et cetera et cetera. You can be a writer regardless of whether or not you’re employed to write. The folks who run Floodmark are writers. The chap who writes sonnets on the back of subway napkins is a writer. The lady who wrote Fifty Shades Darker is a writer. I’m a writer. You’re a writer.

But why write? You understand that this is a hard life to lead. The words don’t always do what you want them to do. They jump around. They struggle. And there’s no promise you’ll make a dime. There’s no promise anyone will read what you write, and if they do there’s still no promise that they’ll enjoy themselves. Hell, there’s no promise that you’ll enjoy yourself.

So why even start writing?

Paul Auster, author of City of Glass (one of my very favorite books) addresses this question in the essay “Why Write?” from The Red Notebook. Auster tells the story of how, as a little, he idolized the great baseball player Willie Mays. One fateful night after a Dodgers game, a young Paul Auster found himself face to face with Mays himself. He asked Mays for his autograph, and Mays asked for a pencil. Nobody in the area had a pencil, and so Paul Auster left that night devastated, beside himself, overcome with the feeling that he the world had tested him and he and he had not been prepared. He writes:

After that night, I started carrying a pencil with me wherever I went. It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without making sure I had a pencil in my pocket. It’s not that I had any particular plans for that pencil, but I didn’t want to be unprepared. I had been caught empty-handed once, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again.

If nothing else, the years have taught me this: if there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.

As I like to tell my children, that’s how I became a writer.

Auster’s story is probably not unlike your own. You discovered one day, in your youth, that you had this means to make your voice heard, and by god you decided to use it. At some point in your life, you too began carrying around Auster’s pencil in your pocket.

For me, that pencil appeared ten years ago. I was living in Taiwan, bored of the same programs that played over and over again on TV. I had access to my father’s laptop computer, but I seem to recall we didn’t have internet, otherwise I’m sure I would have discovered facebook or pornography or something equally banally titillating and failed to have opened Microsoft Word and just begun typing. The drive to write arises from first the opportunity to do so – the pencil in your pocket – and then it becomes an urge, and then a compulsion, and then, if you’re really lucky, it takes you over.

That’s how it goes. You become a carrier for an infection, the symptoms of which may include uncontrollable urges towards creativity, restlessness, fidgeting, use of odd-sounding words, time dilation, and dry mouth. Fortunately, there’s a easy treatment. It’s called writing. 

You may have to keep the therapy regimen up your whole life, but keep it up, and you may find that you enjoy it. 

Keep it up, and others may discover they enjoy your work too. 

Keep it up, and you find your compulsion opening up into joy. 

And whatever happens, keep it up. 

Whatever happens, write.

Vernon Meidlinger-Chin grew up in southern Missouri and currently lives in Taiwan where he is ostensibly a student, but actually just goofs off and attempts to be creative. He is the co-author of such no-hit wonders as "Lady Redundant Woman", "The Anteaters from Outer Space", and "Quadriplegic Patrick Stewart (Is Killing Folks With His Brain)". Additionally he writes short stories, essays, and comics, and bakes pies. His work can thus be mostly found in his kitchen, though never for very long.


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