I guess it goes back to 1997.
Mrs. Masters, my 60-years-young and far-too-excited-about-everything preschool teacher, gave a room full of toddlers a bin of crayons and told us to write our names. I was 3, and I thought my name was spelled with four squiggles and a bubble of spikes.
I hadn’t quite grasped the whole alphabet concept yet, but I remember liking the way the crayon felt in my hand. From then on, whenever I found something to write with I scribbled on everything — with magic markers in my sister’s coloring books, ballpoint pen on the TV Guide, dull pencil on the electricity bill, thick red Sharpie on my dad while he napped.
I filled every blank surface with my signature scribbles.
But art was never my forte. Turns out, I draw a lousy picture, and clay feels weird under my fingernails. It’s been said that my eye for photography has cataracts, and every collage I ever made looked like a magazine vomited onto a piece of construction paper.
It wasn’t until several years after Mrs. Masters put out that bucket of crayons and told us to write our names for the first time that I realized something: you don’t need to “get” cubism or memorize every detail of a Picasso to hold a pencil and use it well.
You can make words do whatever you tell them to. They’re concrete; they can be interpreted different ways but still be traced back to the same roots. And when you write something, you decide what a sentence means based on the words you use. When you read a story with my byline on it, I’m the one who decides what words you read next.
It’s a feeling of responsibility and power that I can’t get enough of. The words on the page are at the mercy of my story.
Maybe that’s why I write so much. Most of what I write is arbitrary to the rest of the world, since I write everything down. My desk is covered with sticky notes that bear random reminders of things I’ll probably never get to. My calendar has every meeting, birthday, deadline and date crammed in. I haven’t seen the bottom of my backpack in months — far too many crumpled, barely legible notes have lined the bottom of my 11-year-old L.L. Bean backpack for months at a time.
My mom calls it a health hazard.
I call it proof of passion.
Should you be so brave as to wade through the sea of yellow legal pad scraps and balled-up college-ruled pages, you’ll find my notepads. Some are full. Some are empty. Some have pages covered in chicken scratch so messy even I can’t make out what they say, much less remember what I was thinking when I grabbed a pen and dug through the mess because I just had to write it down.
Regardless of whether I remember writing it, it’s the act that gives me a sense of stability. Writing is cathartic and honest and solidifies a thought that may otherwise disappear back into your mind if it doesn't get out. As soon as you write something down, it’s real. No longer is it a figment or dream — it’s a thought turned into words, solidified with a few strokes on a page.
And then there’s publishing.
Once something runs in a newspaper, it may as well be carved in stone. You could seek out and burn every copy, but the words were there once, and, chances are, someone read them. The core value of journalism is to serve and inform the public, not yourself.
I wish I could say I write for myself — great writers throughout history have had their innermost thoughts published and worshipped for centuries — but most of the time, I don’t.
So I guess that means my health hazard of a backpack is for you, whether you decided to read it or not.
The notes no one wants to read or decipher come in between the stories I write for the rest of the world. I’ve never been fit enough to get runner’s high, but I’ve felt the high that comes along with writing a story you know someone else will read. The audience I write for depends on my words, looks to me as a source of information. The words I choose are crucial.
They’re crucial because long after I walk away from a story, it’s still somewhere out there. By the time I walk away from a story, that story belongs to the reader.
By the time I walk away from a story, that story is yours.