Somebody Back East - The JourneyMan's Journal

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Why the Writer Doesn’t Write

Journey back in the Journal.

I came to my journal for the first time in three weeks and realized I had little to say, so I said a little. I found that a little depressing. I wondered how much I really had to say at all, so I thumbed through the journal. I perused and surfed the words of my soul. I found they soared and sank and sometimes stumbled along.

A natural break in the way the binding has given into its manipulations over the course of more than three years caused the journal to fall open to an entry on 11/13/2023. I landed on a spot where I had wrestled with my writing.

There, I shared one of my favorite movie funnies of all time. It is from the epic Dances with Wolves, starring Kevin Costner. A foul-mouthed fellow named Timmons is guiding Costner’s Lieutenant Dunbar to the wilderness fort in Indian territory when they happen on a pilgrim’s wagon. It had been attacked by hostiles and Dunbar found the man’s bleaching bones and an arrow sticking from them.

Timmons found it funny…

“Somebody back East is sayin’, ‘Why don’t he write?’”

I guess I was stuck in November of 2023. I had projects on my mind and I listed a few of them:

“Whores at Christmas”—which is still in the hopper and will be the coup de grace of my short story collection called The All-American Songbook.
“Route 66”—this one is a book of sermons/bible lessons and is somewhat underway, but far from finished.
“Ye Olde Limericks of the Bible”—Yeah, probably not. I did write one on the previous page of my journal and it is included in Moonshine Love.
“Vapor”—This was to be the title of my memoir, which has at least a dozen pieces completed but is far from done, and the title will likely change. I have some leaders in the clubhouse for it. Like a friend said, “Don’t people do something to become somebody and then write a memoir?” Well, yeah. Mostly. But some became somebody we knew because they wrote a memoir. My favorite Irish-American writer, Frank McCourt, is case in point with Angela’s Ashes. He was 70+, by the way, when he completed the manuscript. Before the book, he was a school teacher in New York. So don’t dismiss the memoir idea. I ain’t done considering it yet.

Those were things on my mind to write on 11/13/2023.

Why Doesn’t the Writer Write?

In my journal, I provided possible answers:

Lazy. Sometimes, that is exactly why. Writing is hard work. Good writing is even harder.
Fearful. What if I write it and nobody reads it? Well, that is almost a given at this point, right?
Discouraged. See number two ⬆️
Depressed. See numbers two and three ⬆️⬆️
All of the above.

I Wrote a Note of Random Encouragement.

At the bottom of the 11/13/2023 journal page, I wrote something that didn’t seem to fit. But as I revisit it, I think maybe it does.

I had come across the story of Elon Musk’s maternal grandparents, Joshua and Wyn Haldeman. They were successful in business. Joshua was a chiropractor and an avid aviator. He was famous for leading family expeditions in his single-engine plane to find the legendary “Lost City of the Kalahari” in southern Africa. Wyn was as adventurous as he was. They lived politically controversial and undeniably adventurous lives.

I stumbled onto their motto in my reading on Musk’s life and it stuck hard enough for me to append to the discouraged writing of that November day nearly three years ago: