Well, what have we learned? I set out originally to understand writing a bit better. Although it defies direct description at times, I feel like I’ve gotten at part of the core of it, in a way. Listen:

Tomorrow, I will berate myself over how sloppy my flash fiction is.

Next month, I’ll probably cry because my poems are bad.

Next year, I may flip out over a book that changes my life.

My feelings towards writing aren’t going to go away. In the worst of times she’ll appear to me as my guardian angel, in the best of times, as my personal demon. But if nothing else, amidst the chaos of life, writing will allow me to grab a moment of peace, a brief reflection, a tiny shard of bliss.

What more could I want in a best friend?

On my fourth day of freshman orientation, feeling lonely, depraved and anxious, I began keeping a journal. I chronicled my experience as a college freshman, dazzled and confused with this new place. When Hurricane Sandy hit, and campus lost power for a week, my whole world entered a dream-like stasis.

Classes stopped. Suddenly without any homework, the specter of writing hung around me, asking I take this time to produce more work, to bleed onto a page, to do anything to continue feeling I had a reason to go on. And then – amidst the sulking – the following happened, as recounted in my journal. My friends and I sneaked onto the uncompleted Quad during the height of the storm. For maximum effect, play the song as you read this excerpt:

Finally, we made it to the center of the quad . . . for the first time I noticed not just how savage Sandy was, but how beautiful she was. There was something intensely harmonic about the movement, about the destruction. . . . Sandy was like a raging symphony – like Beethoven’s fifth, undeniably energetic yet thoroughly planned, capturing so elegantly the spark of spontaneity to make it all look effortless – of course this note would come next, of course the wind would blow this direction now.

When I landed (metaphorically) from my experience, I looked over and saw Nikki jumping up and down, pointing at a wind-snake of leaves. I reverted to cringing: “Nikki, it’s dangerous!”

                         To which she replied:

                        “Luke, it’s poetry!”

Writing need not be agony. It need not be pain. It doesn’t have to exist on a page or in your mind, it does not need to be forced, it does not need to be slaved over, it does not need to be anything more than a split second.

Writing is just being.

Out of my love for literature, I joined my high-school’s literary magazine. When, at the end of the year, it came time to arrange the order of the pieces we had accepted in the magazine, I took charge. Because we were idiots, we printed out all the individual pieces and laid them out on a table in the library on the penultimate week of the school year. I started to shift them around, moving the poem about eagles toward the front, dragging my own murderous melodrama towards the back, situating that photograph between those two pieces. Shuffling them around, I felt the power of revision at my fingertips. As someone who to this day still leaves much to the last minute, this might have been my first early substantive encounter with the revision process. The following is a poem from that year’s literary magazine.

I would learn much more about revision when I started revising the countless random poems I had lying around. Junior year, a newspaper article my grandma clipped for me introduced me to a local poetry slam, where competition spoken-word poetry events were held bi-weekly. The first poetry slam I ever competed in was simultaneously my best and worst experience with writing. Leading up to it, I slaved over a poem I wrote about my mom for a week, revising and rememorizing it each night, until it felt perfect. When I finally got on stage and performed it in front of the audience, my hands went totally numb and my breaths became short and spasmodic. This audio clip below is not that poem, but it does communicate, I think, how frightening I was.

When I sat down, exasperated, and sighed in deep relief, the judges awarded with me phenomenal scores, putting me in the lead. As was the rules, the winner of the first round was the first to go in the second. So, recalling my much less rehearsed second poem, I donned the stage, performed, went twice the time limit, received a huge penalty, and was promptly booted from the competition. I think there’s a moral somewhere in this story, but I’m not sure where. Certainly, I saw the power of revision, practice and care – but I also saw before me my own raw amateur foolishness. In the same night I performed a poem that made me feel incredibly proud and a poem that made me feel incredibly embarrassed. Never before had I experienced just how potent a tool writing was, how powerful it is when controlled, how explosive and dangerous it is when left wild and untamed.

School writing has traditionally come easily to me. Quickly my love for putting pencil to page was channeled into a talent for argumentative writing. As I grew, my essays became more rigid, formal and sleek. I spoke in the passive voice. “We” analyzed everything, not “I”. I don’t think this was bad writing exactly, but rather the clean, pruned version of my wild, extravagant thoughts. I was always ranked advanced proficient on standardized tests. I received good grades on my writing through middle school and made a seamless transition to high-school. My first high-school history essay got the highest grade in my class.

I was not satisfied with this. My ego spiraled out of control. Either I was set to produce the next great literary classic at any moment, or I was a vain, selfish idealist who would never pen anything of any value to anyone. I was not willing to put up with the awkward phase Ira Glass describes where my taste exceeds my skills.

Writing transcended fun, transcended work, transcended a calling – writing was agony.

With some hesitation, and some excitement, I took to reading. First, Doctor Seuss and The Very Hungry Caterpillar (a perennial favorite of mine). Soon after, it was the medieval-fantastical draw of Deltora Quest and Dragonology. By fifth grade, it was the thoughtful prose of Roald Dahl and Eoin Colfer. All of these people played with language and storytelling in a way that delighted me, whether it was Seuss’s sheer poetics or Dragonology‘s construction of a mythological world using encyclopedic articles. 

But most important, I believe, is that somewhere around this time, poetry arrived in search of me. By the time high school began I had already been enthralled with E.E. Cummings and challenged by the bold-faced Charles Bukowski. I wrote my own poems – furiously, vigorously, and badly. I was both frightened and encouraged by Bukowski’s poem “so you want to be a writer?”:

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

I responded to Bukowski’s demand by writing things like this:

What is a friend
But a fanciful rose
That sits on your windowsill
And strikes a pose?

I’ll tell you why not
You see
For a friend is much more
Than just that to me.

They are the bravest warrior
The greatest ally
The most magnificent painter
They are not one to lie.

My friends are not tools
Much more than that
They are my colleagues, my equals,
My superiors, at that.

What it all boils down to
My dearest friend, you see,
You are much more than a rose to me
You’re a great, big tree.

I can lean on you and you’ll support me.
When you are depressed
And gloomy, morose and without glee
The I will let you lean on me.

I’m tempted to rag on this poem, but hey, it’s cute enough, and my Mom and Dad both supported me and told me it was good when I showed it to them, and that was validation enough to keep going.

As I grew older, I read . . . well, I read what I was told to. I read Tuck Everlasting and Where the Red Fern Grows and The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. All fine books, all of which made me cry, gasp, and smile with delight. But reading them was like pulling teeth. I repeatedly had to buckle myself down and force myself to get through these books, even though I liked them when I did read them. The moment I began to dread the thought of having to sit down and remove myself my friends or my computer or my idle thoughts and actually read – that was when reading stopped being fun and started being work – fulfilling work, but work nonetheless.

I was a child in love with paper. Obsessed with Yu-gi-Oh!, I took to making my own cards, scribbling down names of fake monsters on index cards and playing with the cards as if they were real. Hey, it was some sort of writing, right?

My home was littered with elaborate level designs for fictional video games and lengthy descriptions of fictional worlds. My school notebooks featured zany comics. In those early years, my imagination always found as much form on paper as it did in play. I’ve never lost the obsession. I have four full notebooks from just this last year replete with journal entries, poems, sketches and daydreams.

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These years spent playing card games and imagining up endless fantasy worlds stealthily taught me a lot in a way that I didn’t even understand until recently was actually teaching. From these games I learned math and strategy, but also I encountered a different culture (the distinctly Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh! cards) and interacted with their symbols and stories while also interacting with own culture’s symbols and stories. For every

The Kappa is a mythological Japanese river creature known for its trickery ranging from the innocently passing gas to murder and rape. I’ll admit, I have no clue why this particular Kappa is psychic. Japan is weird that way.

Psychic Kappa, there was also a Baneslayer Angel: a cultural counterpoint. I learned the thrill of well-played games, the dramatic storytelling behind the Yu-Gi-Oh! television show, and how to play with symbols and adapt them to ways that worked for me. I often included the Masamune, a Japanese mythological sword, as a weapon in the games I thought up in my head, without realizing all the cultural weight it carried.

And this, all this, was above all fun! I wrote like this and did this for fun.

One way of looking at this is that I’ve always had a need for writing. According to my mom, after I decided that I didn’t want to be a fireman, a barber or a priest, I settled on writer.  Many of my imaginings then and now are still of grand, award-winning stories. Do these get written? Nope. Do my dreams sometimes flutter out of my ears and onto the floor, often viewed but rarely pick up again? Yes.

Luke, meet writing. Writing, meet Luke.

I did not learn to read because I wanted to explore books. I did not learn to read because someone set out to teach me.

I learned to read so that I could play video games. Boo-yah!

With great amazement, I used to watch my older brother play The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. I’d pester him: “Bruce, what does that mean?” and he’d read: “The Great Deku Tree wants to talk to you! Cloud, wake up!” (Instead of naming his character Link, as the game suggested, my brother would name him Cloud, the main character from a different video game).

“Bruce, what does that mean?”

“Can Hyrule’s destiny really depend upon such a lazy boy?” he’d say.

It got to the point where he just read it aloud at all times. He did not like doing this. To save himself the annoyance he’d send me off to the kitchen to fetch a can of coca-cola for him at regular intervals. Those rare moments without me must have been pure bliss.

Of course, I wasn’t stupid – I wanted to be a grown man and play Zelda on my own one day, so I took it upon myself to learn to read. Of course, that was not all I learned from playing Zelda – I also learned about what it means to tell a story and how to tell it. I learned all about what they call “The Hero’s Journey” in high school, as Link traveled across the land collecting the medallions of the seven sages to save Hyrule from the evil Ganondorf. I learned about Din, Farore, and Nayru, the three goddesses of Hyrule, and the people of Hyrule’s origin story: How the three goddesses created their world, as told to the heroic Link by a magical speaking tree.

It was fantastical, magical, engaging – above all, a well told story. It was, in a word, culture. By first grade, I could play video games by myself. And so a star was born. As we know, all great authors first played video games to get their literary chops up to par. It’s a trade secret.

So my post about Marquez got me thinking . . . I have just started this blog and all, and though my introductory post helped y’all to get a sense of what I do, I don’t know if it gives too good of a sense of who I am. I mulled it over a bit, and I’ve decided that I’m gonna do a series of posts about what writing is like for me, since that is after all one thing I want to write about (what writer doesn’t want to write about writing?) and it will give you guys a chance to get to know me. Since I’m pretty busy with schoolwork during the week, I’ll post the next part every Saturday (or at least I’ll try to). But before I start the series with how I learned to read (sure to be an interesting tale), I have to address the following question:

“Why do you write?”

It’s a difficult question, one that I have to ask myself almost every time I sit down with a pencil and paper. It’s a lot harder to justify the existence of writing than it is to justify the existence of, say, math, or science. Those people (most of the time) aim to produce something of practical benefit, so it’s easy to look to them and say that it makes sense for them to be doing what they’re doing. But writing’s a bit harder to get at. It seems to be something that people can’t not do. If nothing else, it’s just a fun hobby – like music, or skateboarding. And it has in common with those that if you are good enough at it, other people want to see you be good at your hobby – which translates to record sales, X-games spotlights, and in the case of writing, publication.

Although I think most people would be pretty satisfied with that description, it doesn’t quite capture the whole picture for me. Writing can be a very complicated, personal and sometimes painful endeavor. It’s not always fun, even if you decide to write of your own free will. And unlike skateboarding, writing is something that you are forced to do in school and throughout your life just for the sake of communication.

So why do I do it, at the end of the day? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I have some ideas for what I want to say throughout this series of posts, but I’m not sure where it’ll end up. That’s part of the fun. Watch out for “Write On: Part 1” coming soon to a blog near you!