I guess the profound answer as to why I write is that I fooled myself into believing I have something to say. I keep going back in my mind to a young woman I met in a housing project in New Orleans, who told me, from the depths of her broken heart, about the day her little boy was hit by a stray bullet on his way to school, trying to make me see how his books fell out of his satchel and tumbled to the concrete.

I told her I was sorry, and she told me not to be, as I scribbled her words down in my notebook.

People forget, she told me, if things ain’t written down.

I wrote of my own family with that in mind, in memoir and in biographies of women who dragged cotton sacks and men who lost their arms in the machines of a mill, books that by some miracle became successful, though the greatest success was in knowing how many people read them who had never read a book before. I know for a fact that many people who know what is in those books could not read at all, that some sat as their wives read them aloud, or listened to them in audio books.

I wrote mostly to honor my mother, who really did drag me on that cotton sack, and my kin, who helped raise me when there was sometimes barely enough for their own families, and, reluctantly, at first, to show a side to my father that was not wobbling from bootleg liquor or haunted or enraged.

I came, in time, to understand the true power in all that, a power I had heard about all my young life but dismissed as something the rich folks did to make the craft seem like more than it is, more than just storytelling. Yes, it can be hard; yes, you sweat blood sometimes, it seems.

So, you see, there are dark and serious reasons as to why I do this stuff, though I guess if I were honest I would admit that I mostly do it because it is easier than roofing, or carrying concrete blocks, which is about all I have to fall back on. There is a difference between real blood, from smashed fingers and cuts and wounds, and the writer’s kind.

It took an honest-to-God legend, a flesh-and-blood myth come to life, to remind me why it was also supposedly fun. A few years ago I agreed to write the life story of Jerry Lee Lewis, to write his life as he remembered it, and, while there were some risks in that,

I mostly just sat in a chair by his bedside and listened as he told me of the Louisiana bottomland, and church music, and Elvis.

Some days we sat for long minutes in silence—sometimes he told me what he was remembering and sometimes he did not—and at the end of the day I took the story of his life I had written down and tried to piece it back together into something fine.

While the journey was nowhere near easy, or joyful, it reminded me, at the end of it, that there is something fine and lasting in what we do, when we attempt it. It is all I have ever been any good at, which I guess is a cliché.

But at least I did not have to sweat much blood to come up with it.

Rick Bragg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of the New York Times bestsellers All Over But the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, The Prince of Frogtown, and I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story. He is currently a professor of writing at the University of Alabama. His newest book is Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story (Harper, October).

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