Why I Write

Views & Reviews: essays and book reviews

A Substack subscriber recently wrote: “I don’t know how you keep up with the pace of writing you do.” It was a fair question, and it made me stop and think.

Why do I write an article, essay, or book review nearly every day, sometimes more than one?

Is it to express my thoughts and feelings? Perhaps partly. Is it to see my words on a screen, to watch sentences form into paragraphs and ideas take shape? There is something satisfying in that. Is it because I enjoy seeing my work published, knowing it reaches thousands of readers? That matters to me too, though perhaps less than people might assume.

But honestly, none of those are the real answer.

The real answer is simpler and, I think, more surprising: I write because writing is how I learn.

When I sit down to write an article, I almost always have to do research. That research leads me somewhere I have never been before. Sometimes it is a new subject, a corner of history or science or art I had never explored. Sometimes it leads me somewhere more personal, into a deeper understanding of my own beliefs and values. Either way, I come away knowing something I did not know before. That is the fuel that keeps me going.

There is no one place where I write. I write at the diner over breakfast, at the gym, in an easy chair at home, at my desk, in my Subaru, and on the living room sofa. I write wherever an idea occurs to me

I write on a wider range of subjects than anyone I know. Politics, law, history, science, music, art, business, philosophy, aging, Civil Rights, baseball, relationships, and more. Some readers have noted the breadth. What they may not realize is that the breadth is not accidental. It reflects a restless curiosity, a desire to understand the world in as many of its dimensions as possible, and an awareness that no single subject can satisfy that appetite for long.

A recent example illustrates what I mean.

I wrote an essay about Django Reinhardt, the legendary European jazz guitarist. I knew who he was before I sat down to write. I recognized the name, had a vague sense of his importance. But I knew almost nothing about his life. I did not know about the fire that burned and disfigured his left hand when he was eighteen, leaving two fingers permanently damaged, and how he reinvented his entire guitar technique because of it. I did not know about his origins as a Romani musician in Belgium and France, the poverty and prejudice he navigated, or the way he created an entirely new genre of music, what came to be known as gypsy jazz, out of those unlikely circumstances. I did not know the names of the major contemporary musicians who cite him as a profound influence, artists whose work I already admired without understanding where some of it came from.

By the time I finished researching and writing that essay, I felt the way I always hope to feel at the end of a piece: enlarged. More informed. Genuinely excited by what I had discovered.

That excitement is not unique to the Reinhardt essay. It is what I experience again and again, article after article. The subject changes. The feeling does not.

Writing, for me, is the structure that makes learning happen. Without the commitment to produce a finished piece, I might browse a subject casually and move on. But when I know I am writing about something, I go deeper. I ask harder questions. I follow threads that lead to other threads. I do not let myself stop until I feel I truly understand what I am writing about. The discipline of writing creates the depth of learning.

I am approaching my eightieth birthday. I say that not to invite admiration or sympathy, but because it is relevant to everything I am describing here.

At this stage of life, some people slow down. They feel they have learned enough, seen enough, thought enough. I feel the opposite. As I get older, my thirst for learning grows stronger, not weaker. There is so much I still do not know. So many books I have not read, musicians I have not heard, ideas I have not fully examined, historical events I have only skimmed. The awareness that time is finite does not discourage me. It makes the learning feel more urgent and more precious.

Writing is the vehicle I have found for doing this. It gives structure to curiosity. It turns vague interest into genuine knowledge. It forces me to organize what I think, test whether I actually understand something, and push further when I realize I do not.

There is also something deeply satisfying about the fact that my readers come along for this journey. When thousands of people read what I have written about Django Reinhardt, or about a piece of history, or a book I have just finished, they are sharing in a discovery I made. That connection matters to me. But it is secondary to the discovery itself.

I will keep writing as long as my mind stays sharp and my fingers can find the keys.

Not to be seen. Not to be admired. Not even primarily to be read, though I am grateful for every reader.

I will keep writing because every article is a door, and on the other side of that door is something I did not know before.

At my age, I still cannot imagine anything better than that.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​