Why Write...?

 

Why Write…

By John W. Vander Velden

 

It is a question I ask myself from time to time…why write? Fact is the answer I come up with is complex. To others it might not seem so. For they might imply that I write because I can. And that is true enough, but does not begin to explain the full spectrum of the reasons I sit hour after hour staring at the screen while my clumsy fingers abuse the keyboard.

To begin with, I am a story teller, and one of the ways I choose to tell my stories is through the written word. Of course, once I imagined that I might earn a few dollars with my stories. I have awakened from that dream years ago, and yet I continue. Since I haven’t earned anything, that is above my costs, I am told that my writing is no more than a hobby. I resent that idea, no matter how accurate it might seem. I work too hard at this craft to accept that my writing is just a hobby.

So why???

For one thing, I recognize I have been given a gift…the ability to create these stories you may or may not love. God provided me the talent. Often it feels as if God supplies the very words that filter through my fingers and at last end up on the page. If I feel that God has given me these things, shouldn’t I endeavor to use those gifts. I consider it my obligation.

Then there are the stories themselves. It might sound strange, but to me the stories are living, breathing things. They dwell within my skull awaiting the opportunity to escape. These stories have always been with me. Each individual tale comes to me from my imagination, and most evaporate with time, yet some are like demanding children that are not satisfied until they have been given their life upon the page.

But there are other reasons, and among them is the simple fact that my books are proof I exist. The stories are a bit of the legacy I will one day leave behind. The books are records of accomplishments. They may not pay cash, but they pay me by increasing my feeling of self-worth.

Completing four books is no accident…Each one is, in some ways, proof of victories won in hard fought battles.

But the war goes on, and perhaps that is the best explanation of why I write…

(405 Words) 11-26-2025

 

Another Excerpt from When Light Comes Unexpected

 

Another Excerpt from:

When Light Comes Unexpected

―Choices―

Taken from Chapter 9

By John W. Vander Velden

 

Nick watched as the afternoon’s light filtered through the branches above and shone on the creek as it flowed. The stream of water was forced to rise and fall by the stones it flowed over and around. A thought came to him as the stream remained within his focus. Matthew said, In life we have choices. Had he made the best choices? We can be moving forward, like the creek’s water, or we can be stuck in one place.

“Like a rock,” Nick spoke aloud as he finished Matthew’s words.

Matthew had told him that, the time he had found Nick sitting in this exact spot. But the man he had come to respect, more, had come to love, had told him something else. Something about the choices each person has to make. With the sound of flowing water, a music that always helped him, Nick remembered those words. And though Nick had often rehashed his past, he had wondered whether the words were true. But now, on this late Sunday afternoon, he reached out to those words and grabbed them like a lifeline. “We make choices, Nick,” the man’s voice echoed in the boy’s head. “We make choices, the best choices based on what we know at the time.”

Had he really? Had he, Nick Coulter, made the decision to leave Missouri, based on what he knew―then? Matthew had continued, “When we look back and say we ought to have done this or that, and feel bad about what might have been, we gotta tell ourselves that at the time, we done the best we could.”

Wishing he could believe that leaving home was best, his doubts had persisted. Was leaving beneficial for his sisters? For his mother? Surely the friction within the home would have decreased. No matter how hard Nick had tried, he and Tanner had not meshed. Nick couldn’t deal with the way his mother’s husband operated the farm. How Tanner abused the draft animals. The poor farming practices which, by now, would likely have the creditors at the door.

Nick bit his lip. Had it been a mistake not to take Mister and Missus’ offer to go home for a visit? Bending over, he found a pebble and tossed it into the water streaming before him. He watched the small stone sink to the bottom of the shallow creek. But that pebble did not come to rest on the creek bed. Rather the swift water caused it to tumble downstream. Certainly not as rapidly as the water’s flow, but it moved rotation, after rotation, until it was out of sight.

He sat there wondering, for that stone was neither the flowing water nor one of the stationary rocks. That pebble had become something unique. How would that bit of rock fit Matthew’s words, when the man described choices?

Nick stared at the stream, barely aware of the flowing water. The small stone may not rush headlong with the stream, Nick decided, but it still moved.

Life might push him along, but it was up to him, Nick Coulter, to decide just how much change it would cause.

“Yes,” he told the rushing water, “Matthew is right. It is up to me to choose. To think through each of those choices and then decide. I must move forward, but at the pace that is best.” And hopefully, he thought, learn from the mistakes he’d make along the way.

Yes, he would go back to Missouri, but not quite yet. If those kids from Illinois were coming, then Mister and Missus would need him for a time.

He gave himself a sharp nod.

(606 Words) 11-7-2025