I have been trying to write this essay for a ridiculously long time now. I sit down at my computer, I get comfortable, I sip on my peppermint tea from a mug that cost too much on Etsy, and I pull up a Word document. I stretch out my hands, work out the kinks in my neck, close my eyes, and take a deep breath, committing to focusing on the task at hand. I open my eyes. I lower my hands to the keyboard and... nothing.

Nothing at all.

I guess it’s kind of ironic that now I've practically committed my life to finding words and putting them on paper, I seem to have hit a wall and be unable to locate any of them.

I started this essay with a simple question in my mind. Why do I write stories? Why does everything I put on paper, whether poetry, fiction, or even personal experience essays, seem like an attempt to chronicle my thoughts, feelings, and ideas in story form? Why am I so drawn to the idea of telling stories in the first place? I really thought, when I started, that this was a question that I could answer easily. In the original draft of this essay, I wrote about my childhood, about growing up with parents and siblings who read me book after book every night, who filled my life with stories both old and new. I wrote about my lonelier years in a school where I was bullied, where I took refuge in books. I wrote about trips to the library and endless hours spent in fictional worlds. I wrote about a shy girl who hid in the spaces between the paragraphs and tripped over commas every time she tried to take a step. I wrote about someone who relied on words to get her through life.

That was the problem, I think. I was writing about someone who doesn’t really exist anymore.

Nowadays, if I’m being honest, I don’t always have time to sit and read for hours. Worse than that, even when I do have the time, I don’t have always the energy. While I still read often, both for pleasure and for school, the days when I would sit for hours and hours reading book after book are long gone. At the moment, I’m currently in the midst of reading about twenty different titles. My reading habits have evolved from focused to bordering on attention deficit disorder. Such is life.

As terrifying as this is to type, I have grown up. I have a life, and one that is very often busy and distracting and full. I have friends, multiple jobs, responsibilities, schoolwork to pour myself into, creative projects to brainstorm and complete, and a relationship to maintain. I’m no longer the little girl who needed stories to feel full. I am my own person now. I don’t hide in stories, I make my own.

So why do I still feel drawn to writing stories? If my life has become such that I no longer feel the need to hide in books or use them as some kind of fictional shield from a less than perfect reality, why did I choose this path? Why am I writer?

Here’s the thing. I’m not entirely sure.

When I say that, I don’t mean that I’m unsure about my decision to write. I mean, there was no decision. I have been writing since I was six years old, starting with heavily plagiarized tales that took more than a page or two from my favorite Disney cartoons and storybooks. This evolved into stilted, but original, stories of my own, which developed into “fanfiction” I wrote about the characters from my favorite movies and books, which finally morphed into longer pieces in which I actually began to take some pride. I was always writing, always a writer. I can’t remember a time before that was a part of my identity. I’m groaning at the cheesiness of all this a little as I type this, but I guess you could say I didn’t choose writing, writing chose me.

Stories fascinate me. They always have. There’s something about the fact that we, as human beings, take the shadows of our experiences, the bare bones of a life we have lived, our most intimate revelations, thoughts, and ideas, and turn them into a whole separate, fictional reality, that totally boggles my mind. Oftentimes amateur or beginning writers will have the phrase, “write what you know” thrown at them. I remember this advice being given to me and feeling confused. Write what I knew? I didn’t know anything. That’s the reason I was writing in the first place—putting myself in someone else’s shoes through writing about their fictional experiences gave me an insight into a different world view, and let me explore options that I might never take anyway. It let me figure things out, test things, put words into character’s mouths and see what fit and what didn’t. It let me study what I thought about the world without ever really committing to anything. It let me put on a mask and play pretend without ever even moving from my desk chair.

It took me a long time to figure out what the advice “write what you know” really means. It doesn’t necessarily mean write only about what has actually, really happened to you. All that sentiment means is that you should write about what you understand, even if the only thing you really understand is the feeling of not understanding anything. That’s okay. Write about that. Write about not knowing how things works because, spoiler alert: nobody knows how things work. Write about what you wonder, what you believe, what you hope, and what you wish for. Write about what you understand, whether that’s twisted, relentless, cloying, or weird. Write about what you understand, because, the most important thing you can ever do while writing good fiction is tell the truth.

Fiction is, at its core, a string of made up concepts, in essence, a lie. But what makes good fiction different from a lie is that it is written by someone who understands what they are writing. And when something is written by someone who understands what they are writing, it is granted its own kind of truth. It can ring a bell with you, even when the unspoken agreement between writer and reader is that the latter is being willingly deceived. If you don’t write about what you understand, than you will just be stringing together some lies, and just plain lies with nothing behind them, no matter how clever they might seem, do not, ultimately, make very good reading material.

Writing is really hard. People forget to mention that sometimes, so I’m just going to put that out there. Writing is really hard, and often seems like a pretty thankless job. It can take a lot out of you, and, at times, it gives nothing back. I dislike the word “discipline” because it makes me think of old-timey teachers hitting their students with rulers, so I prefer to think of writing as a repeated exercise of the brain, something you do over and over to get stronger. But, just like physical exercise, mental exercise can be exhausting, and draining, and overall just not something you want to do on a Saturday morning when you also have the option to lie in bed, eating leftover pizza and watching sitcoms. But you have to commit, if you really want it. You have to keep writing. You have to write even when you don’t feel like that, even when you feel like your muse took the day, the week, the month, the year off. You have to keep going, even when it’s hard, because one day it will happen.

An idea will really take hold, maybe for the first time in months. You will take a deep breath, realize this is the moment, your hands rushing over the keyboard, because you’re afraid if you hold back one inch of your soul you might lose your momentum. You’re hooked now, you’re free falling, and you’re on the edge of your seat. It’s taking form. The words are flowing onto paper. Not all of them are right… most of them are not right, but they can be fixed later. The essence of the idea, of your thoughts, is coming out onto the page, covering it with the words that cost you so much, and that is what matters.

You will see the work you’ve done and delight in it. You will feel it all over. You will know you’ve done well. You will re-read it, and while some of it might make you cringe, I guarantee there will be a line in there, or a phrase, or maybe even just a word that makes you think, “Oh, that’s not too bad actually.”

So you keep writing. And re-writing. And re-writing again. You come up with different ideas. You write more stories. You learn your weaknesses, you learn your strengths. You hone your skills. You get better at knowing when to shut up and when to extrapolate. You get better at knowing when a character is a good one or when you should give them the axe. You get better at knowing when you’re on a roll or when exhaustion has morphed your brain into such a mess that instead of being productive you are just vomiting words onto the page in a rush of blurred letters and mistakes. And then you will realize what the point was all along, staring you in the face.

You will get better.

Once you’ve written something that sucks, you will write something that sucks a thousand times over again. That’s not meant to be a discouragement, or even a shudder-inducing premonition, it’s just a fact. I know. I’ve been there. I have written so many awful things. This is probably one of them. But I keep going. I keep stringing words together. I keep focusing on projects. I keep telling stories, because I think storytelling is one of the closest things we have to magic. Because telling stories helps us understand each other. It helps us walk in each other’s shoes. It helps us realize there is a world outside our own and maybe, just maybe, we might be able to visit there. Storytelling brings us together, and together we are stronger than on our own.

So, why do I tell stories? There’s no easy answer. Nothing that doesn’t sound like a cheesy Hallmark greeting card, anyway. But I promised myself I would try to come up with one by the end of this piece, so…

Why do I tell stories?

It’s the same reason that I sometimes press my hand to my chest so I can feel my heart pumping under my hand, feel the blood being pushed through my veins. Because, without it, without that reminder of the fact that I have a pulse, that I have purpose in my fingertips, and original thoughts in my mind, and an impression to make on the world around me… well, I just wouldn’t be sure I was really even alive.