The Art That Asked Almost Nothing From Me

And Somehow Gave Me Everything

Yes, that’s me, thirty years ago, searching.

If I’m being honest, writing is not something I chose.

It’s something I finally found.

For more than forty years, I built a career in window coverings. It was good work. Honest work. Creative work. I found ways to express design, texture, balance, and beauty in spaces where people lived their lives. That work gave me stability. It gave me purpose. It gave me a very decent living. And I’m proud of it.

But there was always something in me that wanted a form of creation that belonged only to imagination. Something that didn’t depend on materials, clients, measurements, or installation schedules. Something that was purely mine to shape.

I chased that feeling for decades.

I tried oil painting. I loved the idea of it — the romance of canvas and color and creation. The reality was that I was, at best, an average painter, and I was overwhelmed by everything around the painting itself. The setup. The solvents. The brushes. The cleanup. By the time I finished cleaning, I felt further away from creativity than when I started.

I tried photography. I respected it deeply. But I could never fall in love with the technical side. The gear. The settings. The constant calibration between art and engineering. Some people, like my brother Craig, thrived there. I never quite did.

I even flirted with the idea of woodworking. There’s something sacred about shaping raw material into something permanent. But it demanded space, tools, noise, dust, storage, and infrastructure. It was beautiful — but heavy. Logistically heavy. Physically heavy. Mentally heavy.

And then there was writing.

Writing asked for almost nothing.

A laptop. That’s it.

And suddenly, creation was portable.

I could write while waiting at an airport gate. Sitting in a coffee shop. In my car between appointments.

Early in the morning, when ideas arrive before logic has time to interfere.

Writing is the easiest art to start.

The hardest part, of course, is writing something worth reading.

And that part never gets easier.

Most of the time — honestly, almost all of the time — I have no idea who reads what I write. A novel goes out into the world. A Substack post gets published. It exists somewhere beyond me. I assume people read it. Sometimes I hear from them. Often I don’t.

But that’s never been the fuel.

The fuel is the process.

The act of building an 80,000-word metaphysical thriller from nothing but thought and instinct. The act of writing a 5,000-word essay about something that has taken hold of my curiosity that week. The act of shaping language into something that feels like it existed before I found it.

To be honest:

I would rather write than read. I would rather write than watch. I would rather write than scroll.

Writing is where I feel most alive creatively.

Over time, writing became something more than I ever expected. It became a way to reach beyond the visible world — to feel connected to people I’ve lost, to imagine conversations with people I never met, and even to give voice to people who never lived outside of story. It allowed me to explore how memory, narrative, and existence often blur together more than we realize.

Whether someone calls that imagination, intuition, or something deeper doesn’t really matter. What matters is that writing opened a door.

During this journey, something changed in me as a writer. I can see it clearly now. The early books were necessary. They were learning. They were exploration. But they are not who I am on the page today. The voice is stronger now. The confidence is quieter but deeper. The stories are less about proving I can write and more about discovering what wants to be written.

That evolution is one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.

I don’t write because I think I have something important to say.

I write because the act of writing feels like finally standing in the place I spent my life looking for.

And if I am very lucky, somewhere out there, someone reads something I wrote and feels a little less alone in whatever they are carrying.

That would be enough.

Writing itself is already more than I ever expected to find.

The older I get, the less I think legacy has anything to do with being remembered. Time erases almost everything eventually — names, businesses, achievements, even entire towns. What seems to last are moments of recognition. A sentence someone reads and thinks, Yes. That’s exactly how that feels.

I think about time a lot when it comes to art — not the time it takes to create it, but the time someone else gives to experience it. A song might hold someone for three or four minutes. A concert might hold them for a few hours. A painting can be absorbed in seconds, even though someone may have spent months bringing it into existence. A museum might ask for an afternoon. But a novel asks for something different. A novel asks for days. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. It asks a reader to return to the same world again and again, to carry characters around in their head while they live their real life. That is an extraordinary commitment. It’s intimate. It’s trust.

And when someone does that — when someone stays with a story long enough to finish it, to live inside it — it still surprises me. When someone leaves a five-star review and takes the time to write something thoughtful, something generous, something real, it never feels routine. It feels like someone saying, I stayed. I followed you there. And it meant something to me. There are very few feelings like that for a writer.

I don’t write expecting permanence. I write because stories are one of the few ways a human being can hand another human being a piece of understanding without ever meeting them. If anything I write does last, I suspect it won’t be because of me. It will be because, somewhere in it, another person recognized something true enough to carry forward.