Why I Write

Just read an essay called "Landscape and Narrative" by Barry Lopez. He makes some points that ring true. Thank you Mr. Lopez for helping me realize why I write, and what I like about what I consider to be good writing.

"The landscape seemed alive because of the stories… The stories had renewed in me a sense of the purpose of my life."

"This feeling, an inexplicable renewal of enthusiasm after storytelling, is familiar to many people. It does not seem to matter greatly what the subject is, as long as the context is intimate and the story is told for its own sake, not forced to serve merely as the vehicle for an idea... intimacy is indispensable -- a feeling that derives from the listener's trust and a storyteller's certain knowledge of his subject and regard for his audience."

"These are the elements of the land, and what makes the landscape comprehensible are the relationships between them. One learns a landscape… by perceiving the relationships in it…"

"… the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes."

"Among the Navaho and, as far as I know, many other native peoples the land is thought to exhibit a sacred order."

"We are more accustomed now to thinking of "the truth" as something that can be explicitly stated, rather than as something that can be evoked in a metaphorical way outside science and Occidental culture. Neither can truth be reduced to aphorism or
formulas. It is something alive and unpronounceable. Story creates an atmosphere in which it becomes discernable as a pattern."

"I think of the dignity that is ours when we cease to demand the truth and realize that the best we can have of those substantial truths that guide our lives is metaphorical--a story. And the most of it we are likely to discern comes only when we accord one another (respect)…"

"Beyond this--that the interior landscape is a metaphorical representation of the exterior landscape, that the truth reveals itself most fully not in dogma but in paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguish compelling narratives--beyond this there are only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics."

Barry Holstun Lopez, "Landscape and Narrative" from Crossing Open Ground. (C) 1988 by Barry Holstun Lopez. (Read in "Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft" by Janet Burroway)