I am frequently asked why I bother writing my various books. I don’t have a huge audience to satisfy like Stephen King or J. K. Rowling. In my case, my books sell sporadically and I don’t know there is a pattern to the sales except for Not Quite Dark which gathered a following in the genre of apocalyptic and dystopian literature.
As much as it would be delightful to suffer the attention of thousands of fans, that anonymity is rather freeing, in that I may write what I wish and care little about the consequences. When Bob Dylan came out with an electric guitar he was booed, and Ani DiFranco’s love lyrics were slammed as a betrayal. I have no such negative feedback. With only the occasional review trickling in, I need not worry enough about my readers to forgo working on a book like Coming Home to Newfoundland—my talking animal deep ecology novel—or Multiple Personality Disorder—my long dialogic poem in free verse.
This freedom from hounding agents and publishers brings us back to the same question, however: why do I write? I could merely watch Netflix like many others, or play video games—if I enjoyed such a thing—or roll snow into huge balls to melt in the sun. I could watch my life diminish like an overripe fruit on the counter, steaming with flies and stench until I am pitched. I have made another choice, but it has more to do with my sensibility than ambition. In Roger Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tarry” his artificial intelligence Frost has been designed and built by a machine. While the machine is being made however, an error is introduced into the system. Frost “He possessed an unaccountably acute imperative that he function at full capacity at all times” and that leads him to make his hobby the study of human beings.
I am certainly not so assiduous or hardworking, but I have my own imperative, written in lower case. I despise the thought of a year passing and me, standing on the precipice of all that time, and having nothing to show for it. I like being able to look back over the year and being able to point to an accomplishment, nearly of any sort. I told my friend this and she complained that she does nothing, but for her schooling is her accomplishment, and she volunteers, takes on extra courses, until her schedule is a full as Frost’s.
I am not prescriptive about a person’s accomplishments, but I believe we should be making a contribution to society in some fashion. We should improve our moral selves, our abilities, and project those improvements onto the world that we share with others. If that means—as it does for me—that I need to wave my hands over a keyboard like the alchemists of old, and if that means that my accomplishments as just as profound as those mages and charlatans, so be it. At least I was doing something while Rome burned.
