Exceptional A Sixty Seven Year Retrospective Why I Write by Jay Squires Why I Write contest entry

About a year ago, I was interviewed on the topic of my writing. I thought my responses were adequate at the time. I took another look at them today. And like a pole-vaulter, I’m happy I have a second opportunity to clear the bar. And if I’m not successful this time, I may just opt for the third attempt in a couple of years. The rules of the vault allow for it, after all, as long as fate (which trumps all other rules), doesn’t yank me out of the competition before my enthusiasm is spent. So … with my pole tip pointed to the heavens, and my eyes trained on the crossbar, I race down the runway …. ~     ~     ~ After 67 years of almost daily writing, I still face the frightful blank screen … still find myself looking out of a dull, stupid torpor at 7:30 each morning. Something there is inside me that compels me to start my journey anew through the same gray, unwelcoming fog as the day before by tapping out the images my fingers summon up. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t experienced yourself. You know it can be scary. I never have the assurance that this slow, plodding mind of mine will produce anything at all. That, for me, is an unalterable reality. It's been with me since the beginning. And it visits me daily. The only difference is the cluster of feelings that accompanies me to my computer every day at 7:30. And it is that cluster that has morphed over time. In the beginning, it was those heady dreams of fame. You would have found me, as a young man, in the den of my parents’ home, hunkered over my Olympia typewriter, blank page taunting, while I daydreamed of a young Thomas Wolfe, banging his head against the wall, trying to slow the torrent of words pouring through his mind. Thomas Wolfe was every bit the hero to me that Mickey Mantle was to my more reasonable peers. I was certain that the flyleaf of my first novel would announce, “Never, since Thomas Wolfe, with his towering Look Homeward Angel, has a writer written so mind-blistering a novel as the one you are holding.” Those feelings fueled the fire in my gut for the first quarter-century of my journey. Such was the stuff of dreams. Then, at about mid-life, you’d have found me at my Allstate Insurance office where my insubstantial dreams of fame were pushed into the background while I nursed the flickering possibility of finding wealth and independence through the less ambitious and more commercial written word. Not only did I fail in that pursuit, but with it came a subtle, wordless but profound, sorrow at having lost something greater that had been anchored in innocence. It was not a good season in my life. Finally, some thirty years later, I found myself (after failing in both the above phases), witnessing a slow and rather peculiar incubation going on in my creative process. If a woman’s entire nine-month pregnancy is a preparation for birthing, I was definitely struggling through the discomfort of just my first trimester. While a woman has a pretty good idea of what her baby will look like … I had (and still have) no clue of what, if anything, my incubation will produce.  It is this incubation that continues within my creative process, and if I’m not mistaken, that is what the contest’s question, is really asking. What keeps me getting up every morning at 7:30? ~     ~     ~ Facing that screen … and with my mind dully chumming the surface with a new word combination—choosing the flamingo-like dance that a short sentence brings, or the sinewy waltz of a compound sentence—choice-making is the constant of the surface mind. But what my creative mind, below the surface, is scanning for is a wordless feeling ... that I'm counting on the chum drawing to the surface. Today, my greatest joy is chasing that elusive feeling through my daily process of creating. Bear with me … but I can best describe this feeling as watching a beautiful young butterfly through the lens of a camera. You try to keep it at close range and in perfect focus, but as it dips and flits, as it soars and flutters, it keeps sliding in and out of focus. That butterfly is the feeling my writing searches for each day. Once I find that feeling, once I become that fledgling butterfly, it can sustain me for hours, and those hours fly by like minutes. Do I blend into—do I become that butterfly—often? Not as often as I’d like.  For each encounter, there are days, preceding and following it, which are terribly, often painfully, unrewarding. But its next arrival is worth all the struggle that went before. It’s what makes my daily encounter with the blank screen worthwhile—and inevitable.   Recognized

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