It was Bradbury who brought me to the revelation that writing is more than a blood sport, something people do when they’re mildly insane and more than slightly masochistic; that for some people, myself included, it is what they are choosing to leave behind.

Some people want to be writers, and fill their writing with the biggest words they can find and tell us every detail of every single thing, without telling us anything at all. Some people want to be writers, and think they can only be writers by writing the dark and the dramatic, because that’s what writers do. And then . . . some people are writers. They don’t have to try. It’s natural for them, the words are an extension of their fingertips, and others can read them and realize . . . This is writing. This is how it’s done.

Reading Bradbury made me realize that great writing doesn’t need to be full of adjectives and profound statements on human nature. The man is simple. He tells it how it is -- even though Fahrenheit 451 is essentially science-fiction. There is no world where books are burned because the people in charge are afraid of others knowing too much, being able to think for themselves and live independent lives free from the mindless existence they’ve been trained to live. We’re not there yet, not in the time since Bradbury first imagined the idea over fifty years ago, and I hold hope that we will never reach that point, because there is too much yet to be said, too many stories and poems left unwritten.

Which brings me back to my original point -- for me, writing isn’t just a matter of putting things on paper and revealing it to others for fun, or in the far-off hopes of making loads of money from a serial novel that millions of people decide to love. I leave far too much of myself in my writing to regard it that lightly, and it never occurred to me before I read a specific passage what I was truly doing through my writing. It was a conversation between Montag and Granger, near the end of the story, and it revealed everything:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said.
A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes
made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand has touched some way so
your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that
tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do,
he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you
touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.
The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener
is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well have not
been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

Writing is what I’m leaving behind. It’s as simple as that. I may never change the world or become hugely famous or even have children of my own to pass on part of me, but I’ll always have my writing. In a lot of ways, my writing is my child. It’s created from my experiences, my life, is as much a part of me as I am a part of it. I spend my time nurturing and loving it or getting angry at it, worrying about it when I’m at work, thinking about it as I go to bed at night. And when it all comes down to it, I can’t desert my writing, because it’s mine. I may get angry and it may make me cry sometimes, but I’ll always love it.

It might not seem like much to some people, but to me, it’s all I’ve got, and I don’t regret that one bit.