I write for a lot of reasons. I set out to explore the most specific reasons this morning, and found that the biggest reasons was the preservation of a legacy. Obviously writing tells about the author. But it also tells about the reader too. Charles Dickens tells a little about where our society has been, and while works like Oliver helped to reform the work houses, they also remind us of how we have become better, and where we don’t want to return.
One of my favourite family stories was a written down by my great-great grandmother, and it tells of her mother dying in childbirth in a tiny hamlet in Idaho. The greatest thing is that I have a recording of my great-grandmother reading her mother’s story. These were tragic events, and writing them down or recording them may not have meant too much at the time, but over an hundred years after Eliza King Kemsley died, those words have guided me as I have been able to explore Sublette, Idaho, where Eliza died, and Maidstone, England, where her husband came from, and his family lived for generations before.
I write in part because the stories I have to tell may not mean a lot to me, but they may to someone else. I never know who, and I never know why. But the things I write are here for whomever, and they are here to hopefully provide inspiration, or help.
There is one other really good reason for me to write. It is practice. I have always felt that writing is one of the most important skills a person can have, along with comprehension. So I also write just to hone my skill at writing.
I would guess that writing is my second love after photography. I do both for many of the same reasons, to tell the future that I was here, and that this is where they came from. It is my way of philosophising, and finding the meaning in life, to preserve it as I see it, and to hopefully leave something that really should be remembered.
Kelsey Bacon
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