Both the easy and the hard answer to this question are the same: I wanted to be like my dad. The difficulty of these two same answers is their level of convolution and self-reverberation. 

In the easy version, I'm a kid whose father wants to be a writer and who gets the writing bug from going to sleep to the tap-tap-tap of an old manual typewriter from the basement. Aw, how sweet. How innocent and blindly loving. The boy wanting to grow up to be like his daddy. Quick, let's take a picture of that moment and put it on a greeting card and make tons of money. 

The harder version of the answer is more convoluted because of my motivations for wanting to be a writer like him. Loving imitation of one's father is not convoluted. Subconsciously desiring to complete one's father's work out of a desire to justify his time on earth (and, by extension, your own) involves a ridiculous amount of mental pretzeling. And while I can't figure out the motivations of the dead, I can certainly plunge my hands and face into whatever drove me to do what I've done. 

And I was driven, make no mistake. This "becoming a writer" thing was never a calm, reasoned choice. I didn't step back and assess the marketplace. I became a writer because I felt that nothing else on earth would possibly let me live. This need––this addiction, one might say––pushed me all over the country in search of ways to write, people to learn writing from, means of making money at it. 

I've never honestly considered my motivations until now. I've tried to give up writing a few times, when my chances at recognition and commercial success seemed lowest, but those attempts always failed. I took this failure as evidence that I was destined to write. I took for granted that this was my purpose on earth. 

Looked at another way: writing is a disease, a compulsion. I failed to root it out of me when I had the chance. I clung to it, like addicts cling to their own personal diseases, because I loved it, and I loved it because I couldn't conceive of a self without it. That's how quite so romantic, is it? Not so greeting card-esque? 

Lately, as a result of poking around in daddylabyrinth, I've been questioning my own motivations. (I'm not foolish enough to believe that I'll ever change the writing habit.) I'm seeing that my motivation for writing fiction––for wanting to be a fiction writer, I should say, since the artistic activity and the label are two different things––probably comes from my father's desire to write fiction. It's more specific than just being "a writer." If I'd found a trove of sonnets instead, I'd probably be writing sonnets right now. Ditto essays about Greco-Roman history. 

I wanted to take on the man's challenge of "being a writer"––that much I knew early on, no doubt before he died. I wanted to take on the more specific challenge of writing fiction because I had his stories, not his poems or essays or plays. I gravitated toward fiction for decades, with little understanding as to why. I tell myself I love it more than any other genre, but is that still true? Why am I writing daddylabyrinth instead of writing a novel, then? Why am I struggling with/against fiction so much––writing prose poems and, in this project's many video excursions, even moving away from the alphabet entirely? 

The hack new-age life coach in my head says that I've "worked through a problem." The hack psychotherapist in my head says that I've gone through all the permutations of my overwrought father/son identification so many times that it's not fresh anymore, but I still have enough sanity left to recognize an opportunity for escape when I see one. They're both right, I suspect. They just can't see eye to eye about it.