6 Reasons Why Writing Is Coming Home

Sometimes we travel for my husband’s work, and although we all enjoy the thrill of the open road and the excitement of escaping housework and chores and the incessant arguments over who gets the comfortable armchairs, us or the cats, still—

It’s always good to get home.

What is it that makes home home? And why do we return to our writing time and again, over the years, to find those same qualities in the imaginary universes alive in our heads?

1. Familiarity

Of course. Home is you. That’s why you’re there.

And that’s why you keep going back to your fiction—in spite of the frustration of never quite being able to bring that wonderful, multifaceted plane of inspiration here into the tangible daily world, in spite of loneliness and failure and exhaustion and conflicting demands upon your time.

Because it’s you. It’s where you live.

2. Context

In that familiar sphere, you find the framework you develop throughout your life for understanding the trials of living. Newborn babies have no such frameworks—they spend most of their time crying out in anguish. Growing up is developing the frame of reference you need to stay sane for the rest of your life.

When you read great books, you’re building framework for understanding life. When you learn from great writing and spiritual mentors, you’re building framework. And when you go into your fictional landscape and live alongside the characters there, meticulously noting and writing down the details of their experiences, you are applying your framework of understanding to the very real ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ with which we all constantly contend, from cradle to grave.

Storytelling keeps us sane.

3. Emotion

Writing allows you to feel what goes on inside you, your physical, emotional, gut-wrenching reactions to those ‘slings and arrows,’ without simply disintegrating into a pile of shattered rubble. Newborn babies cry and are comforted—babies who are not comforted die.

When you use your words, the details of observed and felt life, to record what it’s like to be alive, you give yourself that comfort. “Someone else has lived through these hard times,” you are saying to yourself and to others. “We can transcend our suffering.”

4. Safety

And the aftermath of those emotions—the devastation of cities, countrysides, relationships, lives—can be caught and named and held up to the mirror so it serves not to destroy you but to temper you, not to compound the darkness but to illuminate the strengths that keep you on your feet, year after year, helping everyone you touch stay on their feet, too.

We need to confront that aftermath, to break through the terror of the darkness that rings our lives.

5. Companionship

All those others are here with you—your characters (whom of course you love, “not always,” as Emily Bronte so candidly pointed out 160 years ago, “as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being”) as well as your writing friends.

This is what the blogosphere has given writers of this generation that writers have never had before: the companionship of thousands. Do not underestimate the power of tribe in your life. You are a writer among writers. You have family.

6. Epiphany

And finally all that exploration, all that suffering, all that tempering and reaching the depths and reaching out and sharing your experience, culminates in those brief, iridescent moments that make all that survival worthwhile: the epiphanies that convince you there’s more going on than any of us know.

There is something intangible beyond what we see and do and say every day, even though the only way to find it and illuminate it is through showing tangible characters, with tangible problems, seeing and doing and saying.

It’s the ultimate paradox, the paradox of living: that the transcendence of the niggling, harrowing, incessant ills of life—the breaking through the familiar to the intangible beyond—is coming home.