Follow Your Curiosity to Create Something That Matters

Today, you won’t encounter many two-hundred-word sentences or millennia-long sagas involving hundreds of characters. Instead, in the twenty-first century, story, prose, and purpose are expected to be tight. In the internet age, with video games, twenty-four-hour news, streaming movies, there is just little time for thousand-page epics. Toward the end of his life Michener gave an interview in which he doubted he would have ever been published if he’d first started in that environment. Thank goodness he came along when he did. Now his stories can life forever.

When I read this, I couldn’t help but smile. I wrote in the margin, prove him wrong.

You follow a strand of curiosity and pretty soon you’ve got an interesting digression, a whole chapter, a book proposal, a book. The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is not to relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one’s curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.

I will always strive to create, if only to release what’s in my heart and soul and find that light.

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