In the dream, I go to a house and walk into its dimly lighted living room. Two poems are projected on the wall. A stranger tells me, “Your poems are incredible.”
How is this possible? I’m not a poet.
“We think you should make them longer,” the stranger says. In the dream this annoys me. Doesn’t he know that saying more isn’t what I’m into; saying more with less is.
The dream ends. I’m still in the groggy twilight, lying in bed next to Miss Nancy. It’s a quiet early morning in the attic of a garage on an old farm in Rhode Island. We are in town for July 4th to visit family.
I consider getting up to write. Because of this damn dream. Because sentences are flooding into my mind. The dream has transmuted into a question: Why write?
Don’t do it, I think. You’ll be on a sleep deficit all day. You’ll be short-tempered and rude. You won’t enjoy the day as much with Miss Nancy, combing the beaches of her childhood.
Yeah, sure. I quietly leave my bed and step lightly into the next room to tap out notes on my phone about why I write.
Then back to bed. Then back out of bed. Good lord, I think. Something is really wrong with me.
Why write?
Tap-tapping in the living room: this urge, this compulsion to capture fleeting thoughts. I reach for an analogy: butterfly collecting.
As a child, seeing a butterfly made me want to catch it. Not to trap it or kill it, but to lure it onto my finger. To pause, appreciate, to hold the moment, because I knew it would not last. Flap flap flap, silently. Then off it goes!
As an adult, I became a butterfly collector. Striving to capture fleeting thoughts and words, not just appreciate them and let them go.
Collecting is about catching the butterfly in a net, dropping it in a kill jar, and pinning its beautiful corpse on a board for display with a little label. Monarch Butterfly. Danaus plexippus. Family: Nymphalidae. Linnaeus, 1758.
Dreams, story ideas, dialog, descriptive phrases, butterflies. Fleeting and precious. Writing kills the moment to preserve it.
To write is to make words sit still so other people can appreciate them, the way collectors catch butterflies and pin them on boards, or the way mineral hounds split geodes open with the crack of a rock hammer to reveal beautiful crystals and colors. “Isn’t this beautiful?” you say to your friends. And they say, “That’s so amazing. So beautiful.”
If the words, dialog, description were allowed to dissipate without being pinned to a board, would they be any less exciting, less precious, less appreciated?
While tapping out my butterflies in the living room, I think of the paintings at Lascaux Cave in France. Hundreds of paintings of animals dabbed in pigment on stone walls 20,000-ish years ago.
Did a cave dweller point out the prancing ponies and foraging feral cattle roaming the land to a friend, and say, “Uggg! Come, see! So beautiful. Is perfect moment. Must preserve so future generations of hominids can appreciate.”
Why write?
This compulsion to record and display fleeting moments—which I now call The Affliction—seized me when I was 10 years old.
As a teen, writing became an identity. I didn’t just write stories. I was a Writer. I wrote like crazy. Bad short stories tumbled out of me.
Eventually, writing became my living. I sold my first story. Then another. One day wandering around an airport on a reporting trip, I saw a cover story on the magazine stand with my byline for the first time. Wow that’s me there.
The thrill wore out. Being a full-time writer and editor became like carrying water back to your village from a distant well in the heat of North Africa. Pay rent… put gas in car… pay for divorce… buy new butterfly net.
Why write?
I don’t have to write anymore. Now I just write short stories that not many people want or need. I’m back where I started, at 10 years old.
I do it without expectation. If someone reads something of mine and likes it, I am grateful. If they don’t, that’s also fine. I’m doing it for the doing of it.
It’s also liberating to know it doesn’t matter whether I do it or not. A little nihilism goes a long way in life. Does it really matter if I write?
I once heard a Buddhist teacher open a meditation retreat this way: “You are all going to die, probably sooner than you think. So, now what do we do?”
I know what I do: I write. But to do it with minimal despair, I resist the delusion that I am a rare specimen that some collector (agent, publisher) will some day come across and put on their shelf for display.
I have a cure for the delusion that “my work” will aggregate into a “legacy” that will cast a long shadow on the world after I am gone: a writer’s death meditation. I don’t find it depressing; I find it liberating.
Here it is: Everything I’ve ever thought, felt, said, or written will be lost and forgotten. In the decades after I die—despite the thousands of bylines, the cover stories, the embarrassingly well-paid journalism fellowship, the editors who loved me, the colleagues who respected or despised me—virtually no one will even be able to recall my name.
Except a niece or nephew who, approaching retirement, may reminisce at Christmas, “Remember Uncle Danny? Wasn’t he weird? Always writing things down. Always chasing butterflies.”
Many thanks to my Substack pal JamesLuo for reading a bloated and unfocused early draft of this essay and insisting that it might actually matter that I write and that my teenage short stories probably didn’t all suck.
This was such a great read !
Fantastic!