Why I Write

 “I read the first ten pages of my leisure reading career while taking a shit. It was the first Harry Potter book, and I must have been nine or ten. The house was busy with the incessant Latin American energy of a family planning a quinceañero: the women’s dresses fluttering about almost as persons themselves; fathers, daughters, cousins, brothers, grandmas, and friends invited over, parachuted down from 707’s hailing from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, landing finally in Maryland—all part of a family happy in its machinal effort to put up this event for the first girl of the family, while Chayanne’s voice echoed down the walls, emanating from the cheap radio that the waltzers used to practice the dance that would open the ceremony. The lucky girl with the crown was my cousin, always the center of attention. Especially then.

So I doubt anyone noticed that I spent a full twenty minutes in the bathroom, only five of which were actually dedicated to shitting.

I remember feeling at the end of it exhausted but pleased, like when you’re back from--

from a healthy morning run. You’re sweaty and your body’s sore, but it’s a welcome soreness. So did my imagination feel then: its book-cherry popped, a part of it otherwise unexplored suddenly excited, exhausted, exhilirated—”

Wait—it’s about writing. 

Ok:

“I guess I could wax Borges and tell you that I was a reader before I was a writer, or that I think that whatever a writer is, it’s the kind of person who besides dipping a blank page in his imagination—hoping to glean something more than a small anecdote from it—reads, reads, and then reads some more. And that, in this twofold process that is imagination-journeying, he arrives at a certain, oh, let’s just say it: a transcendence, building a bridge between his own experience and the experience of others.

“Which is why I’m not going to recant my Harry Potter anecdote. Because  that’s what it’s all about: sitting down and immersing yourself in your own imagination, hopefully interacting with something, a collective something that you’re in touch with beyond the words. And always yourself. Always yourself.

 “I love that word, by the way—imagination. It’s what the whole reading and writing gig is all about. About finding ways to gain access to the magical machine inside you, the particle accelerator that relentlessly likes to indulge in pure prettiness. When you read, you use the book in front of you as an excuse to create landscapes in your mind—to fill its silence with word-sounds, characters, all that jazz. And when you write, you’re scavenging your imagination for what it itself produces in between dreams. You’re picking up the pieces and playing; you’re the baby on the piano. The English language becomes a playground. And for a moment it seems endless. You’re in touch with something eternal.

“You put up a show. The curtains rise and you’re the thespian, so you don yourself with prose and quotation marks and you let it rip. And for a while, the energy of the quinceañero around you dissipates into nothingness, and you’re so absorbed, either in the writing or in the reading, that you can’t even smell the putrefied particles around you.”