I don’t write my questions as often as I used to. Perhaps because life has answered a lot of them. Given enough time, you will find out where you’ll be in the future and what you’ll become and what the world looks like, whether you want to or not.

So, here we are. This is it.

This is it?

But when I was younger, I did write stories to make sense of life and my big questions. What could I have done differently? Will I still be ‘me’ when I’m older? How will I change and will it be for the better? If not, what can I do now to make sure that doesn’t happen?

I wrote about one of those stories and what happened to it here.

When I was in college, I met my first writer friend. First actual friend, honestly, but also my first writer friend. We both liked poetry, classic post-war fiction, and nihilistic humor. We looked down on a lot of the same people, which is a common bonding approach for 18 year olds. Our writing could not have been more dissimilar – I found it comical that all his stories began with someone taking a slug of alcohol, he complained that nothing happened in mine – but our zeal for writing brought us together.

I moved away after college, when phone calls were expensive and the occasional letter the only way to keep in touch on a budget. I worried that we were slowly losing touch. My friend was still in school, dating girls I never met, working crap jobs without me there to listen to him bitch about them. I was also working crap jobs, living with multiple roommates I had nothing in common with, trying to have a social life while the only places for that were an hour’s drive away. The three-hour time difference didn’t help.

From his letters, I also learned he was still writing. I was not.

I still scribbled in notebooks, but I wasn’t writing with great regularity and without the impetus of classes and compadres, I wasn’t finishing any stories or creative non-fiction. I had gotten caught up in volunteer work, which became the center of both my social and political life (I use the term political rather loosely here…) This was my contribution and it was important to me, but it also took from me. Time, mental energy. I didn’t intend to stop writing, but I drifted away from it.

But as always, I got back to it. And one of the things that brought me back were my questions.

Where would my friend and I be in ten years? There was an above average chance he would be married (and as it turned out, he would) and that I would not (and wasn’t). Would we still be in touch? What would our friendship look like? What if he kept writing and I did not? What would happen if we lost that foundational element of our friendship, our passion for writing and self-expression? Could we still be friends or would I lose that too? Could I imagine a life for myself in which I was no longer a writer?

So I wrote…about us ten years or so in the future. My stand-in character kept an intermittent journal but had lost interest in writing. He has friends but not the kind who challenge or inspire him. His writing feels like kid stuff. He assumes his friend had also experienced this lessening of passion, but discovers he had not. The friend shows him dozens of journals filled with poems and essays he’d written over the years, unpublished but documented, meaningful to him.

What happens next? Not telling. It was a good story. Maybe one day I’ll pull it out of the files and freshen it up. You’ll have to wait until then to find out.

But examining those questions kicked me out of a rut. I didn’t want to be the person who fell out of love with writing. I didn’t want to lose that spark or my connection with other creative people. So I did something about it. I started a writers group at the community center. That eventually turned into the zine we published with our own writing. That led to my volunteer work with a few small theater companies and the production of my (badly written) one-act play, as well as paid writing for some local independent weekly newspapers. I wrote and submitted another story to a national anthology, which the editor said was near the top of his b-list but didn’t quite make the cut. I don’t recall that story with as much fondness, so I suspect he was trying to be encouraging.

All of that because I decided to write what was already inside me – my questions or my anxiety, take your pick – and explore possible answers. Even all these years later, I still consider it one of my better stories, even without a high concept, quirky protagonist, or outlandish situations.

I had another story I could have shared here, one that examined questions about my family and what might explain some of their behavior. I wanted to figure them out. I wanted to feel empathy for people I didn’t understand and test drive some conversations I might have around our problems. In the end, I gave that protagonist a piece of a happy ending, devoting almost an entire chapter to a gift he’s given, something he has wanted for a long time but didn’t believe was possible. The gesture resolves a lot of his questions and the pain he carried, and opens new avenues for him. Simply writing out this development made me feel a little better, even though I knew this gift was only fictional. It felt good even to imagine it might exist.

About a year later, in the real world, I received an identical gift from a family member. Not metaphorically identical, but supernaturally identical. The exact thing I had given my protagonist. Exactly as I wrote it. And it had the same effect on me that it did on my fictional stand-in, with the added magical sensation of holding in my hands something I was certain did not exist, something that could not exist so I had to write a story about it in order to give it to myself.

I can’t promise that the act of writing out your questions will manifest similar real-world gifts for you, but I can’t say it won’t.

Writing is magic.

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