Why I write…

To learn

To know what I know.

To catch thoughts I haven’t articulated before.

To touch the ideas in my life’s value system

To fill a need in my mind..a need to say something more important than daily converstional information  and to be heard.For me, writing is a way of learning, organically, from the inside out. I began writing seriously with academic research papers. (Doesn’t everyone?) Whenever I could steer them off their rigid course and find answers to peripheral questions about the topic, I found writing a compelling thing to do: it swallowed hours in that state of self-less concentration that I think of as joy. (Though, certainly, there are also hours of torturous sweating, staring at blank pages, waiting for thoughts.)

If I formulate a question about some aspect of human behavior that puzzles me, or a natural phenomenon that I want to understand more thoroughly, and I write about it, my research may carry me far afield, but the understanding I achieve is richly satisfying. I am undisciplined in that I let my curiosity lead me, but in the end I return to the core topic, the richer for having made the detour.