Hey, I'm Andrew, and I write things down

Why I write, with some help from Dylan Thomas and Pattian Rogers

What to eat for breakfast. What city to make a home in. Who our friends are. What to post online. Our lives consist of so many decisions. What movie to watch on Netflix (some, like this one, are harder than others).  What stories we tell.

We make choices all the time.

As Things I Wrote Down continues to grow and I welcome more new subscribers, I wanted to take a minute to share why I choose to write. As a way of introduction. (Tell me if it all adds up if you’ve been here for awhile).

Some time ago, I read C.S. Lewis' space trilogy, and found myself taking notes about writing as I followed, and enjoyed, the arc of his narrative. In the books, Lewis writes about Maledil, the great Creator, and as he does, highlights a poetics of creativity:

From [the angelic beings'] station the essential arbitrariness (so call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them, there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the wilful beauty of a jest or a time from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad of possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.

~ That Hideous Strength

Here, Lewis re-mythologizes the arrival of humankind on the planet, and suggests that at the moment of creation, the great Creator could have made anything, but chose to make humanity. 

The writer, on a much more finite level, is involved in the same creative process.  Writing is decision-making. Writing requires limitation; as we write, we choose something as opposed to everything. 

My writing is informed by the belief that if we can create, it is only because there is a Creator, who makes and remakes, and brings forth life with words.  

I write to understand the world.

Pattian Rogers, an American poet, quotes a line from a Dylan Thomas poem, one of my favourites:

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Reflecting on those lines that cut through me every time I read them, Rogers says this about writing:

The courage of human beings astounds me, all of us, held by time, green and dying, aware of our deaths, aware of our chains, yet singing, each of us in our own way.  I wanted to say in my own way: Even though death, even though grief, even though deception, even though cruelty, even though pain, even though despair, we live and we declare ourselves. We curse. We extol. We sing. My way is to write poetry. ¹

I understand that, deeply.

My way to say it is: I write because I’m breathing.

It’s transformative to think of decision making as creating. You, in the choices you make today are writing a story about yourself. You, choice by choice and step by step, are crafting a narrative.

It’s a wonderful thought.

I’m grateful that you’ve chosen, for some reason, to spend some time here. I hope the words I write down about how I see the world that time holds us in sparks some hope and meaning for you.

~ AK

This week I released Chapter 8 of Book One in my Ten Silver Coins series, which you can read for free, week-over-week right here.

If you’re looking for your new favourite adventure series, I hope you’ll check it out.

1. I wrote this quote down from an interview I read way back in a print edition of Image Journal (but don’t have a link).