Why I Write

Everyone who knows me knows this story, but what no one really knows is why I wrote that first article and why I continue to write today.

I read constantly as a kid. One of my favorite things to do was to walk to the little library on Union Street in Everett, the two square mile city where I grew up, and to immerse myself in the smell of books. Even though that place was tiny, I could still find a quiet corner where I felt the need to whisper, as I did in church. I’d sit on the cool wood floor and dig into a biography of Amelia Earhart or an iconic Nancy Drew mystery or, when I was younger, the thick Bobbsey Twins books my grandmother bought for me every Christmas.

That place felt both comforting and mysterious to me, and that feeling persists in every library I’ve visited since. The Shute and Parlin Libraries in Everett loomed as basilicas for bibliophiles during those grammar school days, though I didn’t even know what that phrase meant, but it wasn’t until I started conducting research for my own books that I discovered that no matter where the library was or how large, it was home for me.

I write to try to recreate those stories that narrated my childhood. Throughout my adult life, I traced reasons for traveling to certain places or the simple curiosity of wanting to know about another culture back to those early books. Thor Heyerdahl wrote Kon Tiki specifically to provide dreams for girls like me, I thought. Biographers wrote about women like Florence Nightingale in order to inspire me. Jo March existed to show me girls could write big stories.

When I returned home with my stack of books after library visits, my imagination ran wild – both with the stories on the page as well as the ones swimming in my head. A pen and pad of paper became almost more valuable to me than those tomes that now populated every flat space in my home. I filled composition notebooks with high-school-romance poems, wrote lengthy diatribes against war or for the rights of humans everywhere. I had lofty ideas and high hopes that what I wrote would fix humanity. I built dreams out of words.

In high school, those of us with a penchant for writing published two or three-paged newsletters. Teenaged rants against the establishment. Essays with no shape or form. Poems that bemoaned life and its hardships. Foolish little pieces.

But at least I was writing.

I didn’t go to college right after high school, because I was too busy making life mistakes. One of those was getting married too young, a marriage that was both passionate and dangerous and ultimately, almost cost me my life. At one point, I escaped to a stark and lonely farm in upstate New York where I lived in a concrete-block ranch house heated by a tiny wood-stove I didn’t know how to use. I cut green wood for that stove and burnt it while learning how to be a mother to my two-year-old daughter. And I wrote.

It was cold and lonely, I was poor and young, and the only thing I could give my daughter was stories. So I told her about Klorinda, the girl who wanted to be a wizard. I wrote stories about my own memories but used her name, which delighted her to no end. I rocked her to sleep with tales I remembered from those early years in the library.

Even though my writing began when I was very young, and even though I’d written throughout school and college, that was the point when I became a writer: in that forlorn little house where I had changed my name to escape the man I’d married. I had found solace in my own words.

That’s the reason I write. To create solace, to disappear into someone else’s story, to make sense of my own, and to give something to those I love best.

And the reason I continue to write is because writing is the one thing I can count on. It rescues me if I become depressed. It’s an outlet when I’m angry. It’s the way I reach out when I need to tell someone I love them. And it’s become who I am. Without writing, I would not be able to live.

During the upcoming weeks, we at Rewired Creatives, Inc. hope to tell you lots more about writing, including sharing some tips about the process itself, and maybe even some more personal stories about our own journeys. Please LIKE our blog and SHARE with your friends. And hang out with us—we’re going to be running occasional contests that you don’t want to miss!

For now, keep writing and reading!
Cheers,
Dawn