As a writer, one of the questions I’m most frequently asked is, “When did you decide you wanted to be a writer, and why?” Over the years I’ve come up with several answers, some flippant, some more serious.
For instance, I like to say I became a writer due to a lack of imagination – that is, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve also said I became a writer because I loved reading so much, and wanted to be able to have the same effect on others that great books had on me – which is a kind of power trip. I’ve also said that I didn’t become a writer – other people just stopped writing – which is just being a smart-ass.
There is, I suppose a grain of truth in all of these answers, but they’re partial truths, so that after I give them a number of times, they begin to sound false, and I have to make up new ones. So this week I’d like to share with you my latest story of why I became a writer, because I have the feeling it gets closer to the real truth than any that have come before it. This is it:
I think I decided to become a writer, consciously or unconsciously, because I realized that it was a way of being allowed to continue to play like a child in an adult world. What do I mean by that? Well, I’ve always loved playing, which is not unusual at all. In fact the urge to play is universal in children – and, as recent scientific research is showing us, it’s universal in many other species as well.
I always loved playing games, making things up, juggling, playing music, play-acting, and so on. I think what I love about play is that it provides you with ultimate freedom within fixed rules and boundaries, whether it's sports or drama or chess or videogames. For me, play is the source of all creativity, and play, I think is what drew me to writing. Babies play with language – that’s how they learn to speak. So, it was at some point in my adolescence that I began to realize that writing was a form of play I could take with me into adulthood, maybe even make a living at it.
Writing allows me to play with words, images, metaphors, characters, plots, ideas. When I came to Cape Cod I fell in love with this landscape. I wanted to know everything I could about it, and I wanted to play with it, physically, mentally, imaginatively. When I talk to other nature writers, I find that almost without exception the common experience we all had in bonding with the natural world was the element of free play, of pure, unsupervised, undirected, spontaneous “messing around” in nature. It just happened to me later than most. I like to say that for the past forty-five years I’ve been having the childhood here on the Cape that I always wanted to have but didn’t where I grew up. I’m glad if my writing has helped my readers enjoy and appreciate the natural world more. I’m gratified if some of my writing has raised awareness of the environmental problems that threaten the planet. But if I’m honest, I write about Cape Cod and the natural world because it’s fun. Writing, for me, is a way of keeping play at the center of my life. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it – at least for now.
