Why I write and why I don't do drugs

Last week I went to hear Ruth Ozeki read from her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being. I love the Q&A session at these type of events, sometimes even more than the reading. I love the little glimpses into the lives and personalities of the authors. And I am always amazed at how open they are, and how genuine and human they seem to be. They tell little jokes. Make funny comments. Just talk, like the real people they are. Ozeki was delightful. She told stories about how her characters come to her. And about how she rewrote A Tale several times before she got it right.

Sometimes I pretend I am the one up there answering questions from an audience of readers. Today, on my way to work, I was enjoying this daydream. I conjured up a fan who asked me the question "What motivates you to write?"

Here was my answer:

Two things. The first: I can't help myself. Sometime it takes me years to write a story. But it's there. And I can't stop thinking about it. I work on it for awhile, and decide it's not right. But it keeps coming back. Eventually, maybe years after the first idea comes to me, I get another one. The idea that allows the story to be told. But all that time, the story just kind of hovers, looking for a place to land. Right now I've got three stories I keep thinking about. I know I will eventually rewrite two of them, and finish the other. But right now they are hovering.

The second: death. This may seem like a tangent, but I promise, it will connect. I don't do drugs. I certainly enjoy the buzz of a strong margarita or two, but nothing more than that. In college, I did pot once. I ate some pot brownies that friends of mine made. And maybe I ate too much of one, or it was too strong (my friend did spend several days cooking the weed in oil in order to get every drop of THC possible and then used the oil to make the brownies) but it was a bad ride. I sat on the floor of my friend's room and I'm sure it was just the drug messing with my short term memory, but it felt like I'd open a door, then head down a hallway, then open another door and head down another hallway. I couldn't make it stop. The doors just kept opening.

After that, I was scared to die. Because that bad trip was what I imagined death to be: always stuck in a loop of nothingness. No past, no future. Eternal present.

How very zen. And being stuck in the present is probably why most people do drugs--to escape from the pain of past failures or the anxiety of the future. But the present means nothing without the past. And it doesn't mean anything withou a future either. 

I never did pot or anything else again. It was horrifying.

Death is the mother of beauty, wrote Wallace Stevens. I guess that experience of feeling dead, made everything more beautiful to me. Even the pain that comes with being human--it means something. And writing about that beauty that I see and feel, before at some point, I see and feel nothing, seems incredibly important.