Curiouser and curiouser...

A friend asked me why I write. More specifically, why I started writing children's books. I started to spout off all my altruistic reasons. My "how I want to better the world one book at time" hopes and dreams.

He interrupted me, "No, no. Before all those ideas. Your first reason. What made you sit down and start writing?"

The answer was easy, "Oh, simple. Curiosity. I wanted to know what happened to Mr. Schnoozle."

Then I realized, isn't that always the first reason? From the very first book we get lost in as a young child, when our parents are reading it to us, we are curious. The curiosity is there before we can even speak full sentences, let alone read them ourselves. Who are these strange and interesting characters? What are they doing? Where are they going? What's going to happen to them? The previously egocentric child is now enthralled with the idea of someone else's story. Reading stories, or having them read to us, is one of our first lessons in empathy.

I loved that experience as a child. I still love that experience. It brings me the utmost joy to think that one day my words, and the stories they form, could cultivate the ever-essential virtue of empathy by igniting a child's imagination. Among many other reasons, this is why I write.

Neil Gaiman, in characteristic genius, puts it perfectly: "When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letter and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals."*

People sometimes say to me, "Write for yourself." To a certain extent, I do. The very act of it keeps me sane. When it really comes down to it, however, I write for us.


*Originally quoted in Maria Popova's Brain Pickings (7 Aug 2016) from Neil Gaiman's book, The View from the Cheap Seats.