Alas for those who never sing,
But die with their music in them!
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
We gather at Green River for lunch, two of my writer friends and their visitor, an old classmate who happens to be in town. They call him Greg, but his real name is Bernard…
The young man who’d taken off from NC and thumbed his way to Hollywood to seek his fame and fortune, who left home with only a dream and a hundred dollars in his pocket.
Did he succeed? He did indeed. Beyond his wildest dreams…Even Clint Eastwood remarked, “Greg, you are the best.”
We sit at the table and talk shop. Not acting, but writing, the form of performance that does not demand physical grace or youth, but allows one to maintain privacy and still be center stage. Greg says he hopes to publish the novel he’s working on when he’s finished.
But that isn’t the main thing. Writing is. Because, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “No sadder thing than for a man to go to his grave with his music still within.” Write down everything you can. While you can. Do it today. Tomorrow may be too late. You never know.
I grab a napkin, hand Greg a pen, and ask him to jot down that quote for me. I want to always remember why I write. When I come home from our luncheon, I place my napkin with Greg’s handwriting in a green recipe box, considering this the main ingredient to writing persistence.
The drive to be immortal. Brian Doyle writes for the same reason and more…
“Because like all human beings I have an innate drive to leave something shapely and permanent behind me, some marker of passage through the woods…
"I’d like to leave several books behind me so that someday my children will open and read them and think maybe the old man actually had a fastball for a while there…
“Because writing is a form of contemplation and a form of prayer…
“Because writing occasionally leads to rapture…
“Because writing is a way to connect electrically and directly with other people, which we crave, while generally leaving privacy, which we also crave…”
What about you? Why do you write?
