An Egg Manifesto, Part 2: Introspection

Why do I write? And more apro­pos, why do I pub­lish? What is it about my soul that dri­ves me to put forth such an gut­ter­ing stream of words, first in the pages of The Float­ing Egg and now in the guise of these Egg Yolks?

I crave an audi­ence; there is no sense in beat­ing around that bush. I always have. This is not to say that I am an exhi­bi­tion­ist (though I sus­pect that argu­ment could well be made). I am by nature, and pos­si­bly by nur­ture as well, a very open per­son. Secrets do not suit me (although I am cer­tain­ly capa­ble of them when I feel the need) for I love to share. Often this has proven detri­men­tal, and I have learned (and relearned) many hard lessons con­nect­ed to this habit­u­al loqua­cious­ness over the past quar­ter century.

As a fruit of this very basic (and appar­ent­ly inescapable) aspect of my per­son­al­i­ty, when I express myself (and I do so most well in writ­ten form) I want oth­ers to take notice. And by dress­ing my words up in care­ful for­mat­ting and parad­ing them out with tiny trum­pet sounds, I am mak­ing sure, as much as I can, that peo­ple are noticing.

Is there inse­cu­ri­ty at work here? Of course. Am I real­ly that des­per­ate for val­i­da­tion as a writer and as a per­son? Indis­putably yes. There is a need in me that writ­ing for an audi­ence — how­ev­er small or even imag­i­nary that audi­ence may be — meets and sat­is­fies. And in a (pos­si­bly per­verse) way, the need makes the writ­ing pos­si­ble; the ‘pres­sure’ of the audi­ence’s expec­ta­tions (large­ly imag­ined) push me to write more, and bet­ter, and with greater fre­quen­cy, than if I wrote for what I per­ceived to be my own plea­sure. My writ­ing dropped off dra­mat­i­cal­ly after col­lege, large­ly because I had grown depen­dent on assign­ments to dri­ve my cre­ative out­put. His­tor­i­cal­ly the Egg, with it’s dead­lines and grow­ing read­er­ship, had pro­vid­ed a steady impe­tus for me. But spir­i­tu­al­ly exhaust­ed by the most emo­tion­al­ly-gru­el­ing year I hope I ever have to live through, I could not even make that expec­ta­tion move me to take up my pen and write.

Why I write at all may take some more fun­da­men­tal self-exca­va­tion on my part to unearth. But I pub­lish because I want to share, need to dis­play, need to expose the out­put of my soul. This is one of the ways I do all that, and per­haps the most impor­tant to me, at least so far.

Next time we look ahead, and final­ly begin to grand­stand as one should if one is going to use “man­i­festo” in one’s title: An Egg Man­i­festo, Part 3: Prospection