{"id":53926,"date":"2024-01-19T22:51:47","date_gmt":"2024-01-20T06:51:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=53926"},"modified":"2024-01-19T22:51:47","modified_gmt":"2024-01-20T06:51:47","slug":"why-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=53926","title":{"rendered":"Why Write?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This is #19, and the topic is thanks to a comment from Mike Baltar.  A comment, I will admit, I didn&#8217;t see until recently because my website didn&#8217;t email me and my comment widget doesn&#8217;t appear to be working properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If there are any topics you&#8217;d like me to tackle, feel free to comment, and help me justify the energy I&#8217;ll be spending on manually looking at comments until I get my technical issues resolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Personal News<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This was a rough week at work, even though it was only 4 days long.  There&#8217;s so much to do and not enough time or energy in the day.  Plus, there are some complications with work that have me in an awkward position.  I&#8217;m going to have to work quite a bit this weekend to get caught up.  Given how I&#8217;ve had to be &#8220;on&#8221; for several weeks in a row now, without a real break, I think I&#8217;m setting myself up for a sudden and inevitable crash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Upcoming Events and Such<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Boskone is still the next conference.  Checking my email, it seems I&#8217;ve already paid for Norwescon, too, which I believe is in March.  I&#8217;m sure I haven&#8217;t purchased plane tickets yet, and I doubt I have a reservation for the hotel.  I&#8217;ll need to take care of those things soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Topic: Why Write?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m one of those people that <em>must<\/em> write.  The depression is real when I go long periods without creative writing.  This blog challenge helps to stabilize me and make more productive at work.  I need to do more, but I don&#8217;t have the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If I didn&#8217;t fall into depression without it, would I still write?  Absolutely.  It&#8217;s more than a hobby for me, and not quite a career.  It&#8217;s part of my identity.  Also, and this is important: I just really like doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a kid, I was a voracious reader from an early age.  When I was around 12, I tried writing, and it felt like I was reading a story into existence.  It delighted me then, and it delights me now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Writing doesn&#8217;t have to be expensive.  If your wrist is up for it, you can grab a pen and start filling a cheap notebook with your words.  It&#8217;s what I used to do, but all of those early stories are lost and gone.  I like my writing to be a bit more durable these days, so I save it digitally and back it up all over the place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At Arisia, I met and spoke with people that were just beginning to write, or had a desire to write but had not yet taken the plunge.  I offered encouragement to all of these people.  If you have even a whiff of desire to write, you should do it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why, though?  Why do I encourage people to do this thing that I do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Writing is magical.  A writer draws upon their imagination, channels it through the language center of their brain, into their hands, and onto the page.  Then a reader comes along, consumes the words with their eyes or ears, and the transfer is complete.  From one person&#8217;s imagination into another&#8217;s, crossing a potentially vast gap in time and space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Writing is creation.  Writing is love.  Writing is perhaps the most uniquely human thing in the known universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like most art, when you sit down to write, you&#8217;re committing some part of yourself into a medium that can potentially outlast you.  It can be a form of immortality, as long as there are those around that are willing to read your words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure what else I can say about it.  Writing is good.  I prefer to write fiction, because stories are fun and endearing, but I&#8217;ve perused old letters which transported back in time.  I have read instructions that saved me headaches.  I have read articles and obituaries and synopses and blogs and all sort of things that have sparked an emotion or made me think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Without writers, readers would have nothing to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you want to write but you&#8217;re afraid, or you don&#8217;t know how to begin, let me know and I will help you.  For free!  I just think writing is neat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is #19, and the topic is thanks to a comment from Mike Baltar. A comment, I will admit, I didn&#8217;t see until recently because my website didn&#8217;t email me and my comment widget doesn&#8217;t appear to be working properly. If there are any topics you&#8217;d like me to tackle, feel free to comment, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53927,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53926\/revisions\/53927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}