Why write?

Quick answer: because, today included, every time I set pen to paper I discover something.

I used to hate writing. Thank-you letters. What I did in my summer vacation. Five-paragraph essays with a formula that required repetition. Reading novels got me through a turbulent childhood, but I never quite connected reading with writing. I didn't think up stories, and writing meant slog and struggle and tedium.

Anyway, even if I'd wanted to write, I wouldn't have dared write something that would fall short of my Dad's standards. He was a great one for insisting on excellence: it was part of his self-image that everyone in his world was tiptop at whatever they did. "Paddy's the finest thatcher in Connemara," he'd say. Or, "Nobody can break a mule like José." I was good at backgammon, and I was good at reading novels. So that's what I stuck to.

I finally dared dip my toe in the writing waters because the travel editor of Tatler was looking for someone to travel from Beijing to London by train. Leaving almost immediately. It was December, and I had two weeks of holiday from work that I had to take before the end of January, so I volunteered. The travel editor looked uncertain, knowing I'd never written anything. But there was a gaping hole in the May issue and he'd arranged all the tickets, so he agreed to let me go.

I wrote a few more travel articles after that, because they helped pay for my travels. But I didn't much like how I wrote. I sounded self-conscious and labored and pompous.

Then, suddenly, sitting on an airplane, filling out a US immigration form, under "Occupation" I put "Writer." I was an editor at a publishing house, and I'd written nothing more than a few travel articles and lots of jacket flap copy. I didn't have a secret yearning to write a book. Still, there it was: not a decision, but an urge I couldn't resist. I quaked my way through immigration afraid I'd be hauled away for lying on an official form.

When I moved to New Mexico, writing magazine articles helped make ends meet. But still, I didn't really have anything to say. Until, one morning, I woke up knowing that I wanted to write about how lucky I am to have had two fathers—though it was the loss of my mother that made that possible. I wrote an article, and thought I'd said all I had to say in 1500 words; but then the article became the seed of a memoir, Love Child.

I'm just realizing now that both these incidents chime with the Imaginative Storm method. We urge you to let your imagination lead and your rational mind follow--to surprise yourself by writing what you don't already know with your conscious mind. That's what happened to me: my imagination dared me to put "Writer" on that form, and it dared me to articulate the strange, back-handed luck of my family story.

So this too is why I write: to know what I think, and to answer some deep inchoate call to make sense of myself and my life. If I wasn't writing this post, I might never have recognized those two moments as gifts from my imagination.

I used to think of writing as something that only a few people did, or should do--and only if they did it well. I thought writing came from the rational mind: that you thought up a story and then recorded it on paper. I didn't understand creativity, because I grew up valuing only its most brilliant results.

Creativity is not a means to an end. It's a human birthright. It gives us pleasure and satisfaction and challenge. In making new forms and shapes, we express our humanness. We feel alive. We put our mark on the physical universe and stake our place in it.

Yes, fabulous things have been created by unusually talented people, which we value and admire and venerate. But that's not a requirement. Value your creativity not for the story or the poem or the sculpture or the song. Value it for the challenge of shaping chaotic colors or atoms or perceptions into form. And if the pot breaks in the firing, the time was not wasted. You are not the same person you were before you made that shape out of shapelessness.

And yes, I want to write well and I hope people will read and enjoy my writing. But this is not the only writing I do. In developing the Imaginative Storm method, I've learned that the very act of writing, without an end goal beyond the present-moment act, is a gift to oneself, because it's the vector through which we receive the gifts of the imagination. Gifts of creative pleasure and entertainment and nuanced observation and enhanced compassion and insight—eventual result and external judgment be damned.