Why I Write

People close to me tell me my speech sounds fine. Perhaps to them it does.

But I remember what speaking used to feel like. I sense that it is changing slowly, even if the people around me do not hear what I hear.

In April 2001, over one weekend, I had three cardiac emergencies. A few days after they stabilized me and put in a stent, I was standing in a hallway talking to my younger brother Jim, and I fell down. I had suffered a massive stroke. I couldn't talk. I couldn't walk.

I got most of both back—by holding onto the side of a truck until my legs remembered what to do, and by singing along with the radio until my mouth did too. A step, a word, a line of a song. Then another.

What came back was close enough that most people can't tell the difference. I can. A sentence used to be there before I needed it. Now I have to go and get it.

Writing gives me time.

It gives me time to find the exact word, finish the thought, and say what speech may hurry past. After more than seventy years of living, working, failing, recovering, watching, and learning, I still have things I want to say.

I spent four years in the Air Force, much of it overseas. Then I came home and worked security, performed motion-picture stunt work, and built a career selling cars and motor homes that eventually helped turn one dealership into three. None of it made me a writer. But all of it taught me the same thing from a different direction—that most of what we think we understand about a person, a market, or a moment is a first draft we mistake for a finished one. That lesson is in my nonfiction. It's in my fiction too.

I write for the reader who may recognize something useful in those experiences. I write for my three children and my eight grandchildren. I write in the hope that, somewhere in these words, they may find something that helps them understand where they came from, what mattered to me, and what might still matter after I am gone.

I have made mistakes worth naming, not the kind that soften into life lessons once enough time passes, but the kind that cost something and stayed costly. I don't write to make my peace with them. I write so they stay in the record alongside everything else.

I am not trying to write myself into a heroic story.

I am trying to leave behind an honest one.