Friday's NaBloPoMo prompt is about authors and bloggers, specifically which one/s made you desire to chase after becoming an author/writer yourself?
Another near impossible prompt for me.
Why? Because I read. A lot. Or at least a lot comparatively.
I'm not sure that there ever was a single author or writer that made me definitively say, "Yes, this is the thing I want to do."
It's really not like that at all for me. Don't get me wrong, I could write you long lists of authors that I love and others that I enjoy and some that are guilty pleasures, but there isn't one that made me want to write.
So why do I write?
Well, in a way, I write to keep my sanity. It's a purging and processing for my life. When there are things I need to think through or simply process through, I do it pen to paper or more accurately now in the present age, keys to screen.
The physical writing it down helps me to sort it out. It helps me to see where I have the wrong kind of thinking, for example, having an all or nothing mentality about a certain issue or event. It helps me to pin point what are the real issues, meaning, sometimes I get bent out of shape over something, but when I start writing it through, I realize the real thing that bugging me isn't the thing I'm throwing a fit about after all. Plus, when I write it down, it's out of my brain and body. I don't carry the weight of the thought within me. I let it go. Make sense?
Another reason I write is to have my voice be heard. I have a personal life issue with not being listened too or believing that I'm being ignored. There are a lot of things where I think my life lessons learned or my opinion is worth being shared. Sometimes, often times, in my "real" human interactive life my voice is not heard. This isn't because my friends are jerks and ignore me when I'm talking or because my family thinks so little of me that the don't listen; that's not it at all. It has more to do with a culture of speed and information overload. We are all too busy, myself included, to be fully paying our best attention to everyone and every conversation all the time. I like to think I do a pretty good job of being a listening friend/family member, but I know there are plenty of times I just tune out or turn the conversation to something light and superficial just because my listening/attention capacity is exhausted. We live in a culture where everything moves faster and faster by the minute. We live lives scheduled full. Even our down times or free times are filled with our "pleasure activities" like hanging with friends or watching a movie or something like that. We are overloaded with information, good and bad, true and false. It's just how it is. In a lot of ways, it's an unbelievable blessing. I delight in being able to "Google" any part of life at any moment and find and "answer." But, that means a person's voice isn't always heard in the middle of the noise.
Sometimes I write because I want to give general updates on the things that are happening in the lives of the people I live with. The real, flesh and blood people that I interact with in the living of life.
Sometimes I write because there is a challenge. I find the older I get and the more full my schedule gets, the more willing I am to take a challenge. In a sick way, I want to get to the end of my life and find I "wasted" very little of my time on things I didn't want or need to put time into. I want to spend my "time allowance" in this life wisely and with purpose.
The last reason I write is simply because I have a story to tell.
The topic has made me curious though, and because I love a good read, I'd like to hear from you. Maybe you haven't read an author that made you want to jump in and write, but maybe you read one that changed your life or influenced you to change something about yourself. Maybe you read an author on a whim and that writer has grown into one of your favorites. Maybe you've been reading the same author since childhood, tell me why?
See you in the comments.
