What Writing Means in My Life

A certain grad school that I applied to asks a notoriously difficult and probing question about what you deem “matters” – what you hold most dearly in your life. I (quite obviously) wrestled with this question for a long time, and I decided in the end that my writing does mean most to me. I don’t explicitly acknowledge my writing enough on this blog, and how much it means to me, and I haven't yet heard about my admission to this school... am getting quite anxious, and so I thought it would be purgative to post an excerpt from my response to that question here:

I love figuring people out. My moment of self-actualization came after reading a book about a middle-aged dentist. A novella with pastel, eighties-style graphics on its cover. The story details how said dentist met his wife and the subtle difficulties of their marriage, sharing a dental practice. That is all that happens. But as I read, I wept, because I recognized myself. I immediately fell for him. And for the author’s power to communicate the fullness of this man’s “mundane” experiences – being a father, touching strangers’ mouths. Through my own writing, I’ve found meaning in illustrating these kinds of details – being able to dimensionalize my own and others’ experiences and translate them into something universal. Through writing, I’ve developed a habit of meticulous empathy for the seemingly ordinary things that make people who they are.
Last year, I finished a novel I love. For now, it lives in one-hundred-page stacks on my coffee table, but with luck, will live on a used bookshelf with an outdated Millennium-style cover someday. Not what I have written, but the practice of writing – the solitary hours of empathy, spent imagining myself as someone else – is what matters most to me.
Fiction matters because it moves people to see themselves, and to see what they share with others. It helps explain the world and diminishes our confusion when the world doesn’t operate the way we would like. Ultimately, I find writing important because it helps me understand why people are who they are and why they do what they do.

Happy Hanukkah all... May you treasure what "matters" as well! With affection, Suzy.