What on Earth is a literary life?

What on Earth is a literary life? In order to write something you had better think first. Before thinking comes feeling. In order to think it is best to experience it. Sure, you can experience things in various ways including reading, seeing, and doing. Experience the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And so why would a guy aspire to lead a literary life? Well it might be for fame and fortune but probably not. You’d surely be disappointed.

More likely you have to want to tell your story. What you have thought, felt, experienced, and concluded is your story. Can you convey such things in a way to compel others to think, feel, and experience the things you have. You may even ask them to come to similar or the same conclusions that you have?

It’s easy to say I write for myself and who cares if anyone else ever reads it. I doubt that it’s true, at least for me it’s not. I always think about who will read what I’m writing and how it will impact them. Sometimes I’m deeply moved and am in tears when I’m writing something and I wonder if it will have the same effect in the reader. I hope so. If I can elicit the same feeling in a reader as I felt as I wrote it I would consider it a success.

I also endeavor to inform my readers. I know, have seen, and done things that a reader may not have. As a kid I learned a great deal about the world that I, as yet, hadn’t seen or known through books. I learned from Michener, Hemingway, Uris, Lee, Buck among others about the wide world . For example I learned just about all I know about Hawaii, the history and the people, from Michener. Likewise, I became interested in China after reading Pearl S. Buck. If I can engage and inform my readers about Alaska, Korea, and even America then I’ll be satisfied.

For most of my life I’ve thought about meaning and belief. Why is it that people believe things and what does it mean. The enduring theme of much of my fiction is meaning and redemption.