To Stir Mens Blood – Thoughts on Purpose and Life

Take a moment to pause and consider your life’s path. They say life is a journey and perhaps there is wisdom in that. But can we truly journey without a destination in mind? For years, I grappled with intense emotions, struggling to find the right words to convey them. As a writer, this was a hindrance. How can we effectively communicate without the ability to articulate our deepest thoughts and feelings? Minor as this may seem, for years this was a debilitating problem.

Allow me to elaborate. For the vast majority of my life I’ve always wanted to write stories. I would like to tell you that I displayed a natural aptitude at a young age. I never wrote anything with any significance whatsoever. Actually I did very little (if any) writing. But I did read. Obsessively. I think I did it from a pragmatic sense. I had figured out the books were a fantastic form of entertainment. When going to a boring event, or just sitting at home, books were ideal for passing the time. I had discovered the theater of the mind, and while everybody else sat in their seats, bored out of their minds, I was off on some grand adventure. The stuff I recall reading was pretty shallow stuff, ‘The Magic Tree House’, ‘Geronimo Stilton’, ‘The Hardy Boys’ and ‘Junie B. Jones’. Not deep reading by any stretch of the imagination. I remember graduating to reading the tales of King Arthur and feeling rather pompous because I felt I was reading some really mature stuff.

The thought of being a writer didn’t occur to me then. I was merely a consumer, and just fine with it. But eventually I came to a quiet realization. The stuff I was reading was on the level of synthetic strawberry juice. I came to this realization after I started reading a little above my current reading level. Books like ‘The Chronices of Narnia’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Inheritance Cycle’ all left a lasting impression on me. I was like a child used to playing in rain puddles who is suddenly taken to an ocean. It was like seeing a lightning storm for the first time. I was far too young to be able to express this new emotion. I must say, characters like Frodo Baggins and Gandalf, were infinitely more interesting than a slow witted business rat.

I came to realize there were some books that were hardly worth the paper they were printed on, and there were books that would stir my blood. I couldn’t have told you that at the time. I only had the dim understanding within. The idea of being a writer as a career still hadn’t crossed my mind. Yet, there would be times where I would feel something so strongly inside, I just had to try to get it on paper. Were I a little smarter, I would’ve seized that I could use stories to not only entertain but also to express my own thoughts and feelings. Instead I treated it as a pressure valve. I now realize this is vital trait for any writer, but not enough by itself. What I had was wild and unformed, I lacked the discipline and consistency necessary to write anything worthwhile.

The more I read books that stirred me, I found myself wanting to capture what I was feeling and bottle it somehow. I had no idea how to do so, so I spent years spinning my wheels in this regard. As I grew older the idea of being a writer began to appeal to me. It took me a while but I began to consider the question that forms the bedrock of every great novel ever written, what if? This was slow progress, but progress just the same. I just knew I wanted to capture peoples imaginations somehow. Tell the kind of stories I liked reading. What I came up with were bloated, disjointed, chaotic things. I became discouraged, not being able to troubleshoot what was going on. I eventually tried to find a different career path.

I tried a couple of things, basically whatever sounded interesting. I just knew that whatever I was doing, I didn’t want to work on anything boring. I spent a while teaching myself to code, having grand dreams of working at some major tech company, helping build the next world changing piece of tech. (I’ve always admired Steve Jobs) That wasn’t so bad actually, but there was a glaring flaw for me. Coding was just far too limiting. The entire goal is to cram all these tiny little lines of code, into an equally tiny box. Eventually, I realized that this is not what I wanted. At this point I was nearing adulthood and starting to panic slightly. I only understood that I wanted to impact people in some way, but I had no idea how to go about it.

Now we come full circle. I was back to writing, but still couldn’t explain why I wanted to do it. My english skills had improved dramatically, I was getting better at coming up with pretty good plot lines, but still couldn’t give my stories any direction. There are things you can get away with, but lack of direction is an unpardonable sin in writing. After all this time, I’ve finally cracked it. It’s taken me a long time, but I can now articulate what I wanted. I heard a line in a movie, a quote from the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I can’t remember the line exactly, but I do remember the phrase, ‘to stir mens blood’. When I heard that line everything clicked for me. Of course, that was what I was after this whole time! When I read books, my favorites have always been the ones that could move me in some way. I realized that whatever I write, the whole point of telling stories for me, was to stir mens blood if you will. I’m not attempting to write something intellectually great. I’m writing for the heart and the soul. This is my purpose, and my calling.