Why do I write? It’s not because writing is easy, I can tell you that. Writing is hard work. Writing is a lonely job. But writing is also extremely fulfilling.
I’ve had a wonderful life that has included an active professional career. In my time, I’ve been a schoolteacher, a legislator, an investment banker, a lobbyist, and a political consultant. I’ve experienced the enjoyment of watching a classroom of six-year-olds learn how to read and write. I’ve been involved in the drafting and passing of significant legislation involving education, healthcare, and criminal justice. I have helped structure a statewide funding system for common schools and helped structure multi-million-dollar debt issues for state and local governments. I’ve worked with private and public clients to enact significant laws and defeat proposals that would harm consumers, the economy, and the environment. And I’ve consulted with elected and appointed public officials at the local, state, and federal levels.
I’ve done these things and enjoyed the experiences immensely. And all the while I have found time to write.
There is nothing that I find as satisfying as beginning and completing a literary project. It provides a feeling of personal accomplishment that can’t be beat. And it relaxes me. I can get lost in my words and forget the pressures of the real world.
Someone once asked Eleanor Roosevelt if her husband Franklin was ever able to relax. This was a man who had to deal with the Great Depression and World War II. Eleanor said there was always one thing the president did to ease his burdens. He would wheel his chair up to a little card table and work on his stamp collection.
My personal and professional pressures don’t rival those of FDR, but like most people I need ways to relax. Writing is my stamp collection.
Every writer wants to publish a book, to have it sold in bookstores, and to have it available on library bookshelves. I checked the publishing box off my bucket list many years ago when I coauthored a 300-page nonfiction sportsbook with Jack Fried. I hope to publish more books—fiction from now on because I enjoy the freedom writing fiction gives me. But publishing is not why I write. I love the writing process, and I love the challenges of writing fiction.
I think Ernest Hemingway described the challenge of writing fiction best when he said, “You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”
That is why I write.