How I made the decision to write a book

Breakfast is my absolute favorite meal of the day. Enjoying my first taste of the day while the sun's rays, still warming up, stream in through the kitchen window, the aroma of fresh espresso swirls around me, I wouldn't trade it for anything. For me, breakfast is a time for reflection, for planning, for learning more about the world around me, for reminding myself that today is a new day.

Unfortunately, my breakfasts aren't nearly this romantic on a daily basis. During the workweek (especially as the week goes on), 3-minute breakfasts become the norm for me: Scrolling through my email for a preview of my day, flipping through my newsreader for headlines, scarfing down a piece of peanut butter toast simply because I need to eat something. Coffee? In a travel mug. I make up for this complete disrespect to breakfast with elaborate ones over the weekend. I'll spend up to two hours eating an omelet, sipping coffee, reading all the articles that throughout the week I had saved to "read later," and blogging. With little sense of urgency or stress, weekend mornings are my haven.

For a couple years now, a friend and I have passionately argued about how writing, journalism specifically, is changing in the age of Twitter and social media. Essentially, written news is moving towards the likes of television and radio news: headlines with the latest. My friend is in denial. I accept it, but realize that, just like my breakfasts, there is a time, place, and specific type of story that calls for a more involved piece with its flowery language.

Last week, I read a beautiful article in the LA Times expounding the importance of the "long sentence." The author argues that the long sentence helps us to escape from "trite conclusions" and "reductionism." He criticizes how "often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude." He compares books, safe houses for the long sentence, to long conversations with friends. The longer the conversation, the less black and white things become. The more intimacy the more empathy. While of course, there will always be a place for the short-sentence, it can never replace the long one.

Over breakfast a few days ago, I came across The Business Case for Reading Novels (Of course, I only actually read it today since, pressed for time, I had saved it to read later). Experiment after experiment, the article shows psychological evidence for what your parents and teachers always told you when you were younger: that reading books is good for you. And not necessarily books about self-help or business or managing stress or biographies of successful people, but fictional ones. On vampires and girls with dragon tattoos. According to the data, "fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion." Immersing ourselves in make-believe lands with make-believe situations actually improves our capabilities as social human beings in the real world.

I started reading The Help before the movie came out over a year ago. My intention was to finish the book then watch it in theaters. I finished the book last week, and the movie is already out on Blue Ray & DVD (just in time for MLK Day, at least). The novel follows the story of white 24-year-old woman who writes a book exposing the plight of the black help in 1960's Mississippi. Setting aside the obvious themes of the story, there was an underlying message that spoke to me: that this 24-year-old woman, who had a passion for writing, went out and wrote a book.

I started this blog 4 years ago. This will be my 160th entry. Each post is a concise, bite-size, expose of some aspect of my life, my thoughts, or my values. Each article has some sort of ending. In fact, I spend quite a bit of time deciding how to conclude each piece. And the next article? A completely different thought (though my themes may be pretty consistent). So, for the sake of my growth as a writer and according to HBR, the empathetic growth of my readers, I've decided I want to write a book. I don't know exactly what it's going to be about or how I'm going to get there, but the wheels have been set in motion to embark on an exploration of the "long sentence." The first elaborate, weekend-breakfast of my writing career, if you will.

So to the run-on: Bring it. I have a pocket full of punctuation and I'm not afraid to use it.