Write Something

Though the motivating cry for my life is “Finish Something,” (a common challenge for creative people whose problem is having too many cool ideas to pursue) I’ve recently bumped into too many people to whom I want to scream “Write Something!” I have finished a few things and I’m pleased with myself for it. I still have a ton of writings started, yet to be finished for which I am not pleased. Yet, I have even more things I want to do, to write, to create, to build, to learn and to become, so I fear my time in mortality will run out before I run out of cool things I want to learn about and write about.

But this post is about your life not mine. “Write Something!” I’m not even talking about writing a great American novel. How about just a short memoir, or story about what you did on your summer vacation, or even just a letter to someone. It doesn’t have to be big. My most recent book “The Blade of Safavid" took me eight years! It started with one page that I wrote during halftime of a Utah Jazz basketball game. I’m not encouraging you to take the next eight years but how about the next eight minutes to write a note of thank you to someone you care about.

My decision for the theme of this post has been fueled by folks who have plenty of time to know what the popular streaming shows are but have no idea how interesting their own lives are. They have time to complain they’re underpaid, but no time to improve their abilities to communicate with the written word. They have time to hang out but not enough to develop a new talent.

During this mind-trap of me being critical of others, (shame on me) I remembered a story I heard forty-eight years ago. Gratefully I found it tucked in a folder I titled “Write Something.”

“The famed naturalist of the last century, Louis Agassiz, was lecturing in London and had done a marvelous job. An obviously bright little old lady, but one who did not seem to have all the advantages in life, came up and was spiteful. She was resentful and said that she had never had the chances that he had had, and she hoped he appreciated it.

He took that bit of a lacing very pleasantly and turned to the lady and, when she was through, said, "What do you do?"

She said, "I run a boarding house with my sister. I'm unmarried."

"What do you do at the boarding house?"

"Well, I skin potatoes and chop onions for the stew. We have stew every day." "Where do you sit when you do that interesting but homely task?" "I sit on the bottom step of the kitchen stairs."

"Where do your feet rest when you sit there on the bottom step?"

"On a glazed brick."

"What's a glazed brick?"

"I don't know."

"How long have you been sitting there?"

"Fifteen years."

Agassiz concluded, "Here's my card. Would you write me a note when you get a moment about what a glazed brick is?"

Well, that made her mad enough to go home and do it. She went home and got the dictionary out and found out that a brick was a piece of baked clay. That didn't seem enough to send to a Harvard professor, so she went to the encyclopedia and found out that a brick was made of vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate, which didn't mean a thing to her. She went to work and visited a brick factory and a tile maker. Then she went back in history and studied a little bit about geology and learned something about clay and clay beds and what hydrous meant and what vitrified meant. She began to soar out of the basement of a boarding house on the wings of words like vitrified kaoline and hydrous aluminum silicate. She finally decided that there were about 120 different kinds of glazed bricks and tiles. She could tell Agassiz that, so she wrote him a little note of thirty-six pages and said, "Here's your glazed brick."

He wrote back, "This is a fine piece of work. If you change this and that and the other, I'll prepare it for publication and send you that which is due you from the publication." She thought no more of it, made the changes, sent it back, and almost by return mail came a check for 250 dollars.

His letter said, "I've published your piece. What was under the brick?" And she said, "Ants." He replied (all of this by mail), "What's an ant?" She went to work and this time she was excited. She found 1,825 different kinds of ants. She found that there were ants that you could put three to the head of a pin and still have standing room left over. She found that there were ants an inch long that moved in armies half a mile wide and destroyed everything in their path. She found that some ants were blind; some ants lost their wings on the afternoon they died; some milked cows and took the milk to the aristocrats up the street. She found more ants than anybody had ever found, so she wrote Mr. Agassiz something of a treatise, numbering 360 pages.

He published it and sent her the money and royalties, which continued to come in. She saw the lands and places of her dreams on a little carpet of vitrified kaolin and on the wings of flying ants that may lose their wings on the afternoon they die.*”

I wondered then, and I wonder now what that woman did with her time and energy when she wasn’t peeling potatoes and onions—before she received the challenge from Mr. Agassiz? What did she sacrifice to become a writer?

I am not endorsing a popular book I recently read called “Where the Crawdads Sing.” But when I read it, it reminded me of this story and I wondered if Delia Owens, the author, heard this story as well. It is similar in the fact that a nobody can become a somebody, even if nobody knows somebody was nobody or if you are the only one who knows you are somebody. All you have to do is start.

In recent years, I’ve encouraged several interesting people to write some of their life’s fascinating stories. I even suggested names for their books. Here are a few:

“The Cost of Unreasonableness.” – by an arbitration attorney.

“May I See Your Receipt?” – by a grocery store security officer.

“Tails and Tales?” – stories from a confidential hairdresser.

“Don’t Run Aground.” – by an oil tanker master & pilot - marine consultant.

“Afreight of Nothing” – by a long-haul air-freight pilot.

“In Black of Night, or Day.” – by a captain of a swat team.

Then there is one more. A dear friend of mine needed very little encouragement, in fact, none at all. She just needed to see how easy it was to finish something she’d already started. She just published a book which I did not name –Pups, Pooches and Pals. Makes me proud to see one get done. She now has eyes set to complete several more.

Write something. Anything.

So, well, that’s all I have to say about that.

*I was grateful to find at the bottom of my copy of the story where it came from.

[Jeffrey R. Holland, "Borne upon Eagles' Wings," in Speeches of the Year, 1974 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), pp. 402–3; see also Marion D. Hanks, The Gift of Self (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft,