I am, therefore I write

I've long tried to figure out what makes some of us want to see our thoughts set down in print, as if the things we say are so important they should be preserved.

It's not just me. Everywhere I go, I meet people who tell me they're would-be writers. They've just finished a novel, are working on an essay, intend to start a blog.

Back in the 1970s, when I still lived with my parents, my grandmother, Lennie Prather, came to stay with us.

She was dying. She'd been in a coma and then spent a lengthy spell recuperating in a nursing home. Her muscles and eyesight had atrophied. She could barely sign a birthday card legibly. She had, at best, an eighth-grade education.

But she spent the last months of her life laboriously scribbling out with a ballpoint pen the first 80 pages of her autobiography.

When I'm gone, she told me, I want you to make sure this gets published. Take the money it earns and split it among my grandchildren.

Granny had spent 50 years as a housewife, married to a laborer, living in a tiny house on an obscure street in Somerset. Yet she was certain her story was unique and so profound it would make all her grandkids wealthy.

It didn't. Her autobiography never was published — she never even managed to finish it. But I'm glad she wrote as much of it as she did, and I'm sure the act of writing it brought her joy, or at least distraction from her suffering.

An urge like Granny's seems to have taken hold of a sizable portion of the population. The New York Times Book Review recently ran an essay by staffer Rachel Donadio, in which she discusses an explosion in the number of books being published and in the popularity of writing in general.

In 2007, Donadio says, 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006.

The increase is due partly to the ease and low cost with which would-be authors now can publish their own print-on-demand books.

But it's not just that more books are being printed.

According to Donadio, one blog tracker estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day. A National Endowment for the Arts study found that 7 percent of American adults, about 15 million people, practice creative writing.

In 1967, 13 colleges belonged to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, whose member institutions offer master of fine arts degrees in creative writing (M.F.A.s, as they're known in the trade) or other similar credentialing programs. Now the association has 465 member-schools with writing programs.

Yet even as the number of writers multiplies, the number of readers is plummeting, Donadio says. The National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans hadn't read a book in the previous year.

I see this all the time. Half the people I encounter consider themselves writers. But when I talk with them, I often find they read nothing, not even a daily newspaper.

Which perhaps says something about us writers. We want to favor the masses with our wisdom. But we don't always feel we stand to learn much from others.

That attitude may be necessary to the craft. You have to be somewhat of an egotist, or a narcissist, anyway, to endure the frustration of trying to write.

There are so many skills to learn. You face incessant rejection from publishers and the public. You have to spend so much time alone, seated before a mockingly blank computer screen.

You'd better arrive at the game already imbued with a strong sense of self.

But ego can't be the only reason we write.

I think God has placed in humans a primal need to communicate with others.

We're made in God's image, the Bible tells us. In Genesis, the first time we see God, he's speaking — creating a new world with words: ”Let there be light.“

The implied lesson is that words have enormous power. Throughout the Bible, words illuminate. They change minds. They establish relationships of the heart.

God operates on words, and we are his children. So we operate on words, too.

But while nearly everyone feels this visceral need to communicate, the people who write tend to be those who aren't very good at talking one-on-one with those they know best and love most. Instead, they write for strangers.

Finally, our writing stems from a recognition of our mortality. We realize we're only one set of lungs breathing among billions, and that eventually our lungs will quit. We want to leave a monument. We want to feel we were here for a reason.

So we go in our offices and close our doors. We sit in solitude and send out our messages, hoping to be heard above the hubbub and clatter by some anonymous soul.

”Listen to me!“ we cry. ”I am here! I matter!“

Paul Prather, a former Herald-Leader religion writer, is a Mount Sterling pastor. You can reach him at pratpd@yahoo.com or at bethesdachurchky.org.