What compels us to create?

It’s senior year of high school and senioritis runs rampant through our class. My gaze turns toward the horizon, to what I believe will be better things, like a chance to meet girls and actually talk to them.

AP English tends toward pandemonium. The curriculum is geared toward taking the AP exam and not much else. Journaling is introduced. We’re to write in a spiral-bound notebook each day and turn it in once a week. The teacher, Mrs. Joy, reads our entries and occasionally comments, but mostly it’s smiley faces and five-point stars.

Journaling is a challenge. My upbringing has not emphasized introspection. Mostly, I watch a lot of TV, read comic books, and crack wise. I don’t think of much else. My inner world is a looped highway packed with bulletin boards covered in snatches of dialog from films and catch phrases from sit-coms.

Mrs. Joy catches on and, in one of her comments after reading my journal, urges me to share more of what I’m thinking. I begin to journal in the voice of someone who has a rich inner life, sharing the sort of thoughts someone who journals has. Without knowing it, I’ve invented a character.

Stars and smiley faces flood my journal. Turns out, I’m writing my first fiction.

AP English tosses books my way that excite me, such as Anna Karenina, 1984, and Alice in Wonderland, and books that don’t (The Chocolate War and A Separate Peace). The Catcher in the Rye, however, blows me away. It’s breezy and conversational, as if it’s just that character chatting away. I can do that, I think.

At college, new friends introduce me to new books. I go down a science fiction rabbit hole. I read more subversive stuff, like Vonnegut and Hunter S Thompson. I think maybe writing like this would be fun, but how do you do it?

I track down Salinger short stories, then meet Hemingway, Faulkner, and a few others.

I’m studying engineering, but I decide I want to write. But how does one do that?

I want to switch majors but my father exerted his domineering influence and convinced me to stay in engineering. What I don’t understand is how little he knows about “writing” as a thing. My great-grandfather worked the iron ore mines near Duluth. My grandfather started in coal mines as a boy, and worked in steel mills as an adult. And my father, after a stint in the Air Force, found work as a laborer but studied engineering at night school.

“Get yourself a trade,” he says. “Writing is a hobby.”

I get the engineering degree, but all I care about is writing. Except now I’m swinging for the fences, thinking if I write something great, it will prove how wrong my father is.

The one thing my father gets right without knowing it, is that earning a living “writing” is not easy.

All my projects fizzle, go nowhere. Stories are rejected by the biggest lit mags in the country. Agents ignore my screenplays. Publishers return my novel manuscripts. Fifteen years have gone by without so much as a whisper of encouragement.

Having started writing, though, I find it’s something I need to do; it calms my mind.

When not at work, I think about stories. I think about the stupid shit people have done, and turn it into a story. I’m turning chaos into order.

I like to think that, thirty thousand years ago, what gave us (homo sapiens) an edge in survival was the ability to tell stories.

You go out with your crew, you track some game, and somehow you manage to kill it and drag the good parts back to camp. You tell the story of the hunt, each one of you telling your own version, honing in on the truth of what happened and how you made it a success.

In the morning, you gather up some mud, some berries, and blood. You take one of the bones and some fur from the killing, and you invent a paint brush. With it, you paint a picture celebrating the hunt on a stone. More than that, you draw symbols and circles to encode the time of year, and maybe the direction the animals had been moving. You’re making a note for yourself and the tribe on how to do this again next year.

You’re imposing order on the chaos of your world.

Those who stay back at camp—maybe the women, but not necessarily the women—aren’t just lazing around. They’re doing the hard work of inventing civilization.

They have sacred knowledge of the world learned from their mothers, aunts and cousins. They know how to grow crops, find fruit, cook animals, roast tubers and boil mushrooms. They know how to weave, tend wounds, birth children.

They know which herbs heal, and which poison.

They gossip and tell stories to entertain each other, along with sharing the knowledge of how to keep civilization going.

As men and women hunt, gather, and cook, they learn and teach as they go.

As they raise their children, they tell stories heavy with the lessons needed to survive. Generation after generation, they slowly transform the chaos of the world into the “civilized” world we know today.

We refer to modern living as civilized and, in many ways, it is. We shop instead of hunt and gather. We have doctors and nurses who can cure lots of maladies. We poop indoors but, unless you’re in the room where it happens, you hardly know someone pooped.

There’s still plenty of chaos. America has a gun problem. We’re all facing a climate crisis. One of the political parties has embraced fascism and racism. Shit is getting real.

Short stories and novels, movies and stage plays, dance, music and visual arts are how we bring order to the modern world’s chaos.

If you’re telling stories, making music, or painting pictures, you’re encoding messages for the future; hopefully, they won’t repeat the mistakes we’ve made.

Creating art is bearing witness to what we’ve seen. By telling the truth about our world, we help others understand what’s happening.

Human beings have always needed art to advance.

We need it more than ever, now. Tell stories however you can, and share with whoever will listen.

Do your art.