Guest Blogger One: Why I Write

Kaori Fujimoto

A few weeks ago, I asked four writers I know to write a Guest Blog for the week of July 16th. I posed three questions for them to answer. Each responded positively, happy to be of help. We will have a new writer and response for four days this week. Look for the common threads and also the differences in how these four view writing.

The questions I asked: 

1. Why do you write?
2. What does it satisfy within?
3. How do you keep your passion for writing alive and well?

Our first writer is Kaori Fujimoto who lives and writes in Tokyo, Japan. Here is her response followed by an impressive bio. Comments would be most welcome.

Kaori's Response

 I wish I clearly knew why I write. It is an urge, rather than reason, that spurs me to write. I had a first urge to write beautiful prose in English when I was a university student in Tokyo. I was studying international economics to work for an international organization to help make the world a better place. Yet the books I read for pleasure and for my ESL courses—Charles Dickens, William Saroyan, J.D. Salinger, and Carson McCullers, among others—nudged me out of the career path I was planning and finally swept me away to the US where I studied literature and creative writing. The urge, which even felt like a demon steering me into a course I’d never planned, has stayed with me since, even during the years of a hiatus I had from writing to become financially independent. I knew in my gut that, if I make any attempt to give up writing, something would happen and kick me back onto the writing path. So, not writing has hardly been an option, to my demon’s satisfaction—even though my little pieces of writing don’t change the world. But then I believe the world will be a better place when more people become happier by following their hearts. In this light, I may be contributing to the betterment of the planet.

I’d say this urge to write is in the realm of wild instinct, just as baby sea turtles head to the ocean as soon as they hatch on land. No one tells them where to go or why their destination has to be the ocean – they just know, so they go, moving their little legs as purposefully as their moms that crawled onto the beach to lay eggs. So, I imagine how I feel when I write and finish a piece is similar to how baby turtles must feel as they crawl into the seawater and let waves and currents take them where they belong. Doing so just feels right. Nothing else gives me the same degree of satisfaction.

What is satisfied within, then? I think it’s the desire to stay connected with my true self, to become who I’m born to be—who I’m meant to be.

Given all this, I don’t feel the need to do anything to keep my passion alive. The only effort I consciously make is to do, think, and feel only what is truthful with myself, that is, to treat myself well. I don’t write what doesn’t interest me, even if writing it may bring some money and/or recognition and define me as “successful.” Then the passion naturally stays alive and I’m here at my desk or dining table, mulling over ideas, typing a new paragraph, or revising a first draft. I don’t care whatever people say about my finished piece as long as I have done everything I could, or I feel happy about the process and what it has led to.

As I said, I don’t clearly know why I write. But probably I write solely to make myself happy, hoping that the product of my happiness will also help readers feel just a little happier than before reading it.

BIO:

Kaori Fujimoto is an essay writer and freelance translator based in the Tokyo area. She lived in the US Midwest, South, Southwest along with Hawaii to study, work, and loaf, and also traveled a lot along the US East Coast when she was young. She majored in creative writing at US colleges, and she was a fellow of the Paris American Academy Creative Writing Workshop. Her love for international settings and language has enticed her into travel, interactions with people from all walks of life in different cultures, reading widely, and writing throughout her adult life. Her work has appeared in Brevity Nonfiction Blog, South Loop Review, Easy Street, Punctuate, Peacock Journal Anthology: Beauty First, Wanderlust Journal, and more.