Why We Write: Jennifer Lucic

Writing…my escape.

The answer to the question “why we write” is a million different things to a million different people. Some of us write to live, others write to maintain our sanity, or even as we watch it slowly slip away. Yet, in all these examples, writing ultimately serves as an escape.

Since before the days of the Nickelodeon, when patrons would submit their nickel for a chance to sit in a theater and watch the flashing pictures move in front of them, escapism has been alive and well. The chance to leave the monotony of everyday life, and all the suffering that goes along with it, has allured us since before a time any of us could point to in recorded history. Watching those moving pictures on the screen distracts the brain from its own reality, and instead offers a new world of opportunity to delve into, at least for as long as the pictures keep moving across the screen.

What could be better than watching moving pictures? Inventing them! Writing does exactly this. Like a superpower that allows us to disappear into the glow of a computer screen, it is in this escape that we can block out the rest of reality and instead build a world where anything is possible. Where the pain is not our own, but a fictionalization that we can laugh at, cry with, or empathize through.

Art imitates life, and writing is no exception. As we write characters who grieve loss, or wish for love, we feel the emotions inside ourselves as if they were our own. Empathy pours out of us in tears or happy laughs. We can do this because we harness the true pain, love, and loss that we experience in our own lives and reflect it in the lives of our characters. In this way we can escape the torture we feel ourselves and instead cope through the emotions we project into our protagonist who’s lost their father after living a life unconnected to him, or through our antagonist who’s once again tried to foil our hero’s journey.

Escapism is therapy that allows us to cope with the stresses we otherwise wouldn’t know how to deal with. Whether you escape into a movie, or by writing them, the purpose is the same.

I, myself, discovered my powers for writing at a very young age. Hardly eight, I was the youngest in my fourth-grade class. At a new school and uninterested in the assignments that didn’t involve the stories in my head, I asked the teacher if she would allow me to write these stories down in leu of the assigned journaling work. She agreed, and I busied myself every morning, for the allotted fifteen minutes, writing the tale of a monster in a cave who guarded three prize doors. My hero, a prince, would come, wrestle with the monster, and claim his prize behind door number one, two, or three. Inspired by the various game shows my family watched back in the early nineties, the prize was something a prince would have little use for, a new car or a dishwasher. But in my head, the pursuit was all the same as my world of daytime television clashed with my hero’s journey.

The next year, Mr. Campbell taught us the subject of the ever illustrious five-paragraph essay. He assigned us the task of writing five of them together, all on different subjects. Again, the academia of writing eluded me, and I instead wanted to focus my creative efforts more towards fantasy and imagination. Mr. Campbell had discovered my interest in poetry when he caught me writing poems during class hours instead of practicing multiplication. He agreed to let me forgo the assigned essay’s if I would instead create a book of poetry. Homework became fun that day and I spent the weekend writing poem after poem. They flowed out of me like I had turned a faucet on. I disappeared into the task. Mr. Campbell later gave that book of poetry to the principal, who was so impressed she gathered the school in assembly to read some of them aloud.

In high school and my later years, writing again served me. I had folders and notebooks full of the etchings in my mind as I attempted to deal with my feelings surrounding boys and dating and my relationship with food and my body. All the musings of a young woman trying to find her way in the world. And each time the words pecked out on the keyboard or scratched out in ink onto the page, I could cope, deal, and learn. At the same time, it helped the hours to disappear without my even noticing they had gone.

In my adult life, words still do this for me, and for that I am grateful. While life is beautiful, it is sometimes overwhelming, and we all need an outlet to express our sometimes distaste for it. A short escape helps us do that, and in writing is where I have found mine.

Thanks to Jennifer!