It’s impossible to escape the selfish aspect of writing: that of some part of you living on after you’re gone, your voice echoing into the future from beyond the last day of your life. There are a lot of ways to achieve immortality in this world, and certainly storytelling is one of them. Granted, more people touch the immortal realm by being the subject of a story rather than its author in the retelling of it, but truly either will suffice if you’re determined enough.

I believe, as I think most writers do, that every human being who has ever set foot on this planet has had a story to tell. It’s part of our writerly makeup to people-watch, to consider the lives beyond the snapshots we see as their vessels pass by us on the street, to wonder about the coincidental (or not?) cosmic intersections with the paths of our fellow humans with us in line at the grocery store. A solid chunk of my career has been spent listening to other people as I interview them for articles I’m working on, or making small talk as I travel to or from a trade show or conference. I have never met anyone yet who was solidly ho-hum, because if you talk to anyone for long enough you run out of interview questions or small talk and start to connect, whether you intend to or not. We are observant creatures, we humans, and we notice things without even realizing it: an accent we recognize, an interesting piece of jewelry, a family photo as a lock screen. The person across from you will let slip a favorite sports team or a recent vacation or an amazing meal they had the night before, and suddenly there it is: a chapter in someone’s story, right there for you to read.

Writers are gifted with the ability to tell those stories, and fortunately we also mostly come with the internal insistence that we MUST tell as many of those stories as possible, because everyone’s story is worth telling.

What a beautiful thing to be aware of.