I recently finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and felt compelled to pop open the laptop and “write down” a few ideas I was left with. In the book’s afterword, amid its several “special features”, Pirsig mentions that he’s finished with writing, able to live from the successes that ZMM and Lila, the first book’s sequel, have brought him. His reasons for putting down the pen I found striking and memorable: Zen Buddhism, the author claims, encourages silence and reflection, and Pirsig follows this up by saying that “one should not write unless one has something to say.”

I really like this idea, and it gave me the "good" excuse I had always wanted to explain my inability to wordsmith. Maybe I simply didn't have anything to write about.

When I was 19 or 20, I started what I thought was going to be a fantastic journal (not a diary!) where I’d collect all of my wondrously original and important ideas. On the first page of that blank sketchbook, I took a pen and wrote “Introduction”
at the top. After putting in three straight guidelines in the middle of the page with a pencil, I wrote – in black ink – “I want to write.”

That “journal” – 12 years later -- is still on my shelf, infrequently opened and never used for writing. I did put a poem or two in its pages, included a short harangue of an “evil” professor whose Asian Studies course I took at the University of Georgia, and that’s about it in terms of the written word. The interesting thing, however, is that for a while I continued to use those blank pages for other work: drawings, collages, inkjet print-outs of my digital artwork, etc. I think there are somewhere between 25 to 40 illustrated pages in the book, nearly all glued with original artwork.

Maybe I knew it then, but now I’m almost certain that I really only liked the idea of writing, the “glamour” of being a writer. Obviously, what I really wanted to do was be visually creative – put down those ideas (what I wanted “to say”) in a visual form and leave them for a later day of perusal and contemplation.

To be honest, writing for its own sake has always intimidated me, and I’m generally too lazy to try and overcome that inertia. The fact that my father is a writer, and a successful one (at least in terms of Quality), also is a major deterrent, and I don’t like the idea of standing in his long, illustrious shadow.

--January 1, 2004