by Ben Lewis

Created on: July 01, 2008

Why Write?

From time to time I have had experiences that caused me to question this avocation of writing, into which I have poured so many of my resources mostly without anything that could be considered compensation.

It all started years ago. As a freshman in college, I was first stimulated to write, believe it or not, by a required course in English grammar and composition. At one point we were assigned to write an informal essay which I would learn is another name for short story. I hadn't written anything like that since seventh grade when I had created several animal stories inspired by reading the works of Jack London. What I produced for the college course was about five pages. I called my piece A Step Up , a true episode from one of my first jobs when I was 16. I still have that piece in my files but I don't like to look at it because it is embarrassingly amateurish. I got an "A" on the paper and high praise from the teacher so there must have been some poor writers in that class. It was that which started me on this rocky road toward writing for publication.

"Toward" is a good word to use because I aimed but never hit the mark in those days. Another of my earliest fascinations was with James Thurber. I marveled at his The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and humorous essays like The Shocking Truth about Electricity. I tried to write like that. I also loved Mark Twain and I tried to write as he did. Then I discovered Steinbeck and aped his style. It would be a long time before I would find my own voice. And, all the while, there was the preoccupation of earning a living.

I sometimes wish I had changed my major to journalism so that I could get paid for my work though I knew it might entail having to write about stuff that didn't interest me especially. But more influential was my awareness that I lacked the chutzpah to wring a story from an interviewee who isn't willing to discuss the matter for whatever reason.

I've read biographical or autobiographical pieces about journalists who did have that and writing/speaking skills as well and some went on to become quite successful. Among them: Dan Rather, David Brinkley, Charles Kuralt.

The field I ultimately entered, the pastoral ministry, requires a lot of writing, most notably of sermons but relatively few of those are published and we should all be thankful for that, given the quality of very many sermons I've seen and heard and a few of those were my own.

So, in such spare time as I had during four years of college

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