writing life – Page 78

Why we write: thoughts from Junot Díaz

One of the author websites I read regularly is Junot Díaz’s StoryWorlds. Diaz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, among other titles, and through his Substack writings he generously shares his ideas about the writing craft with his readers. A recent post, When the Words Become Breath, or A First Novel Written in Darkness, is one of his more personal entries, and it strikes at the heart of the question of why we write, and what we should expect from our efforts.

It’s also a hopeful story for anyone who struggles with depression, as Díaz did during his senior year of high school — “a depression of the deep dark kind.”

‘You can do something extraordinary’

‘… if you have the opportunity to work on your gifts, it seems like a crime not to.’

I’ve played the guitar, on and off, since age 14, when I first picked up a well-word acoustic with a bowed neck for $10 because I wanted to learn how to play the opening to Led Zeppelin’s classic, “Stairway to Heaven.” (This was in the mid-1970s, long before the ditty became labeled as the forbidden riff supposedly banned from guitar stores the world over.)