Why I Write

The German artist Joseph Beuys once said, “Everyone is an artist”.  However, not everyone is great in every artistic endeavor. 

I tried to be a singer, but I sing like a frog stuck in a rack.  Nowadays whenever I sing the scales, my dog starts howling like a coyote on the lonesome prairie. 

I can’t draw except for Picassoish stick figures and squares that look like blobs of chewing gum.  I could call it “abstract art”, but everyone would know I have less talent than a middle school artiste. 

I played the cymbals in kindergarten, but I couldn’t stand the sound of clanging metal.  Besides, how many cymbalists became rock, rap, or even elevator music stars?  Maybe I should have played a different instrument like the glockenspiel, the bag pipes, or spoons. I might have been a contestant on American Idol. 

I did some acting in junior high school.  However, I didn’t have the movie star good looks, though I could always be a comedian.   Groucho Marx, Jackie Gleason, George Carlin, John Belushi, Rodney Dangerfield, and David Letterman were not exactly handsome, yet they made a fortune telling jokes.   

Yet the allure of Hollywood, Broadway, and the local comedy clubs didn’t allure me.  Maybe because I don’t like being a ham in front of an audience.  

I don’t know how to sculpt, I am not a great photographer, and I dance more like Fred Flintstone than Fred Astaire. 

That is why I write.  It is the one artistic endeavor I can do successfully. 

Writing for me is not easy.  Not only am I not a fast typist, I suffer from that dreadful malady—writers block.  Besides, with the internet, I spend too much time reading news stories and looking at sports scores than writing sentences and paragraphs. 

Besides not being easy, writing can be so exasperating.  I am a perfectionist when it comes to the written word.  I can spend hours writing a simple declarative sentence.  Besides, punctuation can be as nerve wracking as seeing the Greek letters in calculus theorems.  I would like to write something without punctuation, but then my writing would look like incomprehensible streams of consciousness. 

Yet the writer’s life does have its allures.  Even if I don’t write down a single word, I enjoy sitting in front of my trusty computer devising great thoughts.  While I am not a tailor or a tinkerer, I am definitely a great thinker. 

Like every wordsmith, I dream of authoring a New York Times bestseller or winning the Nobel Prize,  But even though I don’t, I will continue writing and writing. 

Weird Fact

When writing, Nobel laureate John Steinbeck used up to 60 pencils a day.