I have been writing for as long as I can remember, which is the kind of sentence that appears in every writer's memoir and tells you nothing. So let me be more specific.
In fourth grade, my short story was selected for the Imagination Machine. If you didn't go to a school that had this, the concept is straightforward and, in hindsight, kind of insane: a small troupe of actors shows up to your elementary school and performs a student's story. Word for word, scene for scene, song for song. They just do it. Whatever a nine-year-old wrote, these adults committed to performing with full sincerity in front of an auditorium of children who were mostly thinking about lunch.
I don't remember what the story was about. I think there was a dragon. There might have been a quest. What I remember is the feeling of watching something that had existed only in my head suddenly exist in a room full of people. The story had been mine, and then it wasn't. It belonged to the actors and the audience and the weird energy of a gymnasium that smelled like floor wax and chicken nuggets. That was the first time I understood that writing is a transfer. You put something down, and if you did it right, it moves.
I've been chasing that feeling with varying degrees of success ever since.
Or maybe reading came first and writing was the response. I'm not sure the order matters. What I know is that I read constantly and have since childhood, and that reading taught me more about writing than any class or workshop ever has. You absorb rhythm from reading. You learn what bores you, what surprises you, what makes you flip back three pages because you missed something. You develop taste, which is really just a long list of preferences you can't fully articulate but can recognize instantly.
My taste runs in two directions that people seem to think are incompatible. I like serious writing. Dense, careful, argumentative prose that takes an idea apart and examines the pieces. The kind of writing where someone builds a case across thirty pages and you arrive at the end having genuinely changed your mind about something. I find that exhilarating in a way that probably says something unflattering about me.
But I also like comedy. Specifically satire and parody, which I think are the most intellectually demanding forms of humor, because they require you to understand a subject deeply enough to dismantle it. You can't parody something you don't comprehend. The satirist has to be the most informed person in the room, and then they have to pretend to be the least informed, and the gap between those two positions is where the comedy lives.
I wrote a piece recently about mass surveillance, in the tradition of Swift's A Modest Proposal. A calm, reasonable, meticulously argued case for why you should want to be watched at all times. I'm proud of it, and the reason I'm proud of it is that it works a little too well. People read it and aren't sure. They agree with some of it. They find themselves nodding along before catching themselves. That discomfort is the point. If you write satire and the reader knows it's satire from the first sentence, you've failed. You need them to believe it, at least partially, at least for a while. You need the ground to shift under them. On a topic like surveillance, making people temporarily believe something horrifying and then forcing them to confront the fact that they believed it; that's doing something a straight argument can't do, and that just tickles my brain.
I think satire is one of the only tools that can actually bridge political divides, precisely because it doesn't pick a side in the way people expect. Gun control, surveillance, whatever the issue, good satire takes the ridicule and distributes it evenly. It laughs at everyone, including the satirist, and in that shared embarrassment there's a chance for people to drop their positions long enough to think.
In high school I joined the Speech and Debate world, though not in the way you might expect. I didn't compete. I wrote speeches for other people. This is the part of the story where a different writer would tell you about discovering leadership and finding their voice, and I want to be honest that none of that happened. What happened is that I discovered I am very good at constructing arguments and very uninterested in being the one who delivers them.
People assume I'm a leader-type. I get why. I have opinions, I'm not shy about sharing them, and I think quickly on my feet. But the assumption is wrong in a way that matters. I don't want to be in front of the room. I want to be the one who figured out what the person in front of the room should say. I like to lurk in the shadows. Be the ideas guy. Feed the machine without being the machine.
This continued into college, where I discovered that I truly, deeply love debating. Not performing debate but the actual process of it. Taking a position, stress-testing it, finding the cracks, reinforcing or abandoning it. Writing speeches is its own kind of reward. You're building a structure that someone else will inhabit, and if you built it well, they'll move through it naturally, hitting each point at the right moment, arriving at the conclusion as though they thought of it themselves. There's a craft to that. It's architecture, not performance.
I have wanted to write a book for a while now. This is, apparently, a common affliction among people who enjoy writing, and like most common afflictions, it sounds simple until you actually try to treat it.
The problem is not writing. I can write. The problem is the question that comes before writing, which is: what do I have to say? Not in the sense of whether I have opinions. I have plenty. The problem is that I'm twenty years old and the kind of book I'd want to read — something with weight, something that earns its page count — requires either a depth of expertise or a breadth of experience that I'm not sure I have yet. I'm suspicious of twenty-year-olds who think they've figured things out. I don't want to be that guy.
But I've been thinking about this, and I think the answer is an anthology. A collection. Not a novel, not a memoir, not a treatise on anything. Just a gathering of pieces that are connected by the fact that the same person wrote them. Short stories, essays, satire, weird experimental things that don't fit into a category. The advantage of an anthology is that you're not beholden to a coherent narrative. You can be funny in one piece and dead serious in the next. You can try something, and if it doesn't work, the next piece starts fresh.
I think that's the format that matches who I actually am. I'm not one thing. I'm serious and I'm weird and I'm funny and sometimes I'm all three at once and the result is something that doesn't fit neatly anywhere. An anthology doesn't ask you to fit. It just asks you to be interesting, one piece at a time.
I'll probably write this thing and put it in some folder on my computer where it will sit, indefinitely, alongside half-finished projects and abandoned experiments and notes I made at two in the morning that seemed brilliant at the time. Maybe I'll put it on the internet. Probably I won't.
And that's fine. Not everything needs an audience. Not everything needs to be optimized for engagement or published on a platform or turned into content. Some writing exists because the person who wrote it needed to write it, and the act of writing was the point, and the folder on the hard drive is not a graveyard but a workshop.
I keep coming back to the Imagination Machine. A group of actors performing a kid's story in a gymnasium. The kid watching from the audience, stunned that the thing in his head was now a thing in the world. I'm still that kid. The stories are different, the gymnasium is gone, and the actors have been replaced by readers who may or may not ever exist. But the transfer is the same. You put something down. If you did it right, it moves.
Even if the only person it moves is you.