Y, Eye-Right?

So I have been busy busy busy lately trying to do all of this school stuff (the end is near!) but I thought that you might enjoy reading the below essay. It was part of a writing portfolio that I had to submit in my Senior Seminar class. It is one of those “Why I Write” kind of things. You end up having to write a lot of these as you pass through various writing classes, but I think that I got it about right this time.

BTW, I know that just thinking that you might find this interesting is so beyond the average sort of egomania as to be broaching on utter self-delusion, but look, let’s be honest, it is not easy to be generating content all the time for this blog so sometimes I have to double-dip. So why don’t you just not complain so much, huh? Why don’t we try that? Otherwise I’m going to have to put you in a timeout.

Okay, anyway, below is an essay explaining why I write.

Enjoy.


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Y, Eye-Right?
By James Bezerra

Attempting to answer the question of why I write always launches me into a kind of existential crisis. Something about my rural upbringing and my Father’s Calvinistic work ethic always makes me think that when people start to wax poetic about the internal muse that they’re really just bloviating all over the place. Attempting to set aside my own issues, I will set sail off into that existential vortex.

First – and this is the truest thing that I will end up saying in this whole paper – I write because I can’t not. My brain is so cluttered with words that they are always banging into one another, like the steel balls of a desk-top Newton’s Cradle. I love words and I love language. However that is not all that my brain is cluttered with. Certain images stick there too and I find myself always trying to describe the images stuck in there with the words stuck in there. I have been carrying little notebooks in my back pocket since I was a boy and when I go back to look through them I find that I have never really written anything in them, but rather they are just scrapbooks of words and phrases. Things that made the inside of my head glow with a weird light. These notebooks are a kind of intellectual and verbal savings account. These notebooks are also where my process really starts, but more on that later.

For now, the truth is that if I didn’t write, I wouldn’t have any outlet for the pressure of all of the language building up inside my skull. It is important to make the distinction here that I seldom dream of stories. First I dream the language. I think that this is the primary reason that I consider myself a writer rather than a novelist or a playwright or a screenwriter. The medium is not particularly important to me. In fact, once the language can be formed into a story, I often have the ability to channel it into a particular form. I have even, whilst bloviating all over someone, said that, “The story chooses its medium.” This should be explained. Briefly.

I have been writing narrative fiction since I was a boy, but as a teenager I started writing plays. After high school I worked as a journalist and I think those experiences explain why dialogue is generally very important in most of my writing. It allows the art - such as it is - to hop the borders of form and I have always taken a lot of pride in that. I like that I can mold the writing into whatever form is required. I have no interest in simply being one thing. I think that this is part of that Calvinistic work ethic. If I’m going to be self-indulgent (which part of my brain thinks all art is) at the very least I can cover as many bases as possible. So I am an award-winning playwright, a former professional journalist, a produced screenwriter and a published short story writer. And, obviously, a very fancy person all around.

There is another reason, though, why I have tried to spread myself across the spectrum; it’s simply that I was never told not to. I didn’t receive any formal creative writing instruction until the Spring of 2008. By that time I had already found myself as a writer, albeit a somewhat schizophrenic one. I think that this is apparent in my writing and it is both a blessing and a curse. I think that all that time writing out in the wild, beyond the safe confines of school, allowed me to develop my own voice in a way that workshops might have squashed. However, it also means that I am deficient in some ways that my peers are not. For instance, since I don’t dream in stories, I often feel like my plots are contrived conveyances for language. I realize that I have tried to compensate for that in school by crafting meticulous and intricate narrative structures. Sometimes I wish that I just dreamed in plot. It would make life easier.

But what does this all have to do with why I write?

It simply makes the point that words are the key. Any single piece of my writing generally begins with words scrawled quickly in one of my little notebooks. Eventually the words start to cling together like sticky electrons and then those phrases start to stick together and form misshapen atoms and eventually I realize that this is something! And then I say to myself, What the hell am I going to do with the phrase ‘Deftron Goat’?

Luckily though, my influences tend to run toward the experimental. I was sixteen when I happened across a copy of Steven Erickson’s novel “Tours of the Black Clock” and I remember reading it in the back of the family van as we drove across the desolation of the Nevada desert. That book blew my mind off its hinges. It was a kind of experiment of form and language that I had never seen before. On the back of that book there were blurbs from both Thomas Pynchon and Tom Robbins. At the time I didn’t know who they were, but I made sure to find out. It was in this way that I learned about what I consider to be my secret family tree. Eventually I found Jonathan Lethem and Aimee Bender. I read every crazy writer that I could get my hands on (there were times when I made the three hour drive to book stores in San Francisco because I didn’t exactly know what I was looking for, but I knew that I couldn’t find it at my local mall outside of Fresno) and while I didn’t try to emulate them, they gave me the support to write however I wanted. When I find myself stuck staring at a blank white page and a mockingly blinking cursor (I first-draft on a computer) I always repeat that to myself: write how you want. As a writer, I am an autodidact, though I had to come back to college to learn that word.

As a creative writing student I have been fleshed out as a professional. I have been given the tools to write effectively. My first semester I was overjoyed to learn terms like: circularity, thumbnail sketch, ergodic, discursive. I remember thinking to myself, these things have names!

Speaking of circularity: why do I write? If we have to get all existential about it, I suppose that I write because it is a kind of active exploration, for me at least. It is part a game of chess, it is part a kind of engineering, it is part a kind of grand and elaborate lie. Writing well means being an expert on everything and it just so happens that everything is exactly what I’m interested in. There is simply no aspect of existence that can’t be contemplated and maybe even understood, through the act of writing. I have discovered that it is through writing that I view the world.

All of this is all fine and good, but the reality is that I was recently rejected by the very best MFA creative writing programs in the country and so the question of why I write has come to the forefront of my actual life as a person. What I should be asking myself is why the hell do I write? Why didn’t I major in business? The answer, of course, is that I had no choice; there was nothing else that I wanted. So in a very real way I am about to set sail back out into the wild where I learned to write, once again without the protection of school and the cozy classes and mandatory assignments. The question of why I write is really a very practical question in my life right now. I know that life would probably be easier if this was not my dream, if I had some other dream. However, I write because I do. There is really no better or more honest explanation. It simply is.

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