Reasons Behind Writing

From my Short Story class along with my Poetry class, I have read a lot of personal essays written by the authors and their thoughts on writing. Most of them have this profound reason for writing because of their ethnicity, or trying to capture the human condition in a story. I will admit, I do not like to read poetry, and from the selection of short stories I have had to read, most were pretty lame.

So I began thinking of my own reasons for writing. I began writing pretty early in my life. I was never a big reader, and even now I am slightly hesitant about starting a book for fear that the end will be crap and I will have wasted all that time. I do not have the first story I wrote on a Commodore 64; I do remember it was about finding a genie in a lamp and getting three wishes. It was probably written around the time Disney's Aladdin came out.

Later on I started a story that was the beginning of what has become an affinity with the science fiction genre. The story was about a man who was working on a machine that caused two worlds from different times to merge together. The feel of it was basically Jurassic Park meets Resident Evil. Again it was written around the time the Jurassic Park movies came out. Due to my limited knowledge of temporal physics and any sort of jargon, I stopped writing the story. I still have that story lying around someone on my PC.

As I said in a previous blog, I had written poetry before I attended college, but I had no memory of ever writing it. Because of this, I do not know what my motivation was at the time for writing it. Perhaps in the case of the genie in the lamp, I wanted to create a story that I would like that would allow my child-self to fantasize about getting three wishes. The latter story would be a more ambitious undertaking of creating a full novel. Since it is written much like a Michael Crichton novel, I can deduce what kind of inspirations I had a the time.

Still now I have inspirations from the late Michael Crichton, and my style of writing closest resembles his, although I do not put as much research into a topic as he did. But the way it is written is much like his, the fast paced narrative that jumps around a bit. My stories may not be technical, but they try to achieve a certain level of believability.

So with all of my current ideas for short stories and novels, along with the poems I have written, the purpose for all of it is to entertain people. I like writing stories that people will enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing. Apart from my poems, the vast majority of my work does not have a hidden agenda behind it. It is possible for a reader to infer something from my writings, but in the end I only want to entertain. This makes me wonder if the work I produce will not be critically acclaimed as the others because I did not write about my lack of ethnicity, or some profound secret meaning of life. I do know that from just about anyone who has laid eyes on my work, I have received nothing but praise. Perhaps that is enough.