I have been invited to read and sit on a couple of panels at the 2009 Get Lit! festival in Spokane, Washington. This year, they are hosting a cyber-panel of festival authors who respond to the question, “What Keeps Me Writing?”  

What keeps me writing? This is a good question. Is it too obvious to say that I am curious about my world and that the surest and most satisfying way for me to learn more about it is by writing about it? Maybe it is too obvious, but I think as answers go, it’s apt. But I also keep writing because there are those moments—and every writer has them—when you surprise yourself, when a paragraph appears, as if telegraphed from some mind that is greater than your own; when the words fire on the page and it is all you can do to keep up with the rhythmic tug of narrative and the story that is unfurling itself before you.

Writing is like chasing a great idea down. It is an activity, a vocation, an art that calls to mind that oft-quoted E.M. Forester line: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I seldom know where an essay or chapter or book is going to go, until I have finished it (at least in draft form).  And for me, that is the great fun, the chase. Like in love, chasing it is two-thirds of the reward. I am not quite as sentimental when I am talking to my students, however. I simply tell them that the writing process is the process of discovery. It’s certainly not a new idea, and I’m sure I am cribbing someone else here, but it’s true: I write to discover what I do not know, or to crystallize the half-understandings and polish the half-ideas that rattle around in my mind.

And when it works, when it really works, there is no mistaking the feeling you get: not only have you placed words in a place where they had not previously existed, but you have done it in a way that affords new ways to see the world, new modes for accessing meaning. If there is a better motivator to write, I certainly haven’t found it.