Why write? A question I’ve been asking myself lately. I’m 82, and can feel, almost as a physical sensation, the ebbing of my mental and creative energies. Whatever reputation I’ve established isn’t going to be enhanced by one more book; nor is the world exactly clamoring for the next Phil Caputo novel. (My last one, Hunter’s Moon, despite a front-page rave in the New York Times Book Review, applause in the Chicago Tribune, and praiseworthy blurbs from prominent writers, sold a mere 10,000 copies). Philip Roth and Alice Munro formally announced their retirements in their 80s. If people of that caliber see fit to hang up their spurs, it seems pretentious for me to go on scribbling.

This rational argument, however, loses out to my compulsion to keep scribbling. I’ve been doing it for so long—half a century—that it’s become as natural, and essential, as breathing. Plots and characters, sentences and partial sentences and whole paragraphs flit through my brain, demanding to be expressed; they drive me to my desk to scrawl them on a blank page or type them onto an empty laptop screen. I continue to believe that I still have something to say, continue to think, or hope, that at least a few people will find pleasure or truth in whatever I have to say, continue to feel that filling those blank spaces with words gives me a sense of purpose no other endeavor bestows.

And so I will be publishing my 18th book, Memory and Desire, this coming fall. And so I’ve recently completed three short stories of a new collection I hope to finish in the next year. And so ideas for two more novels tease me in my waking moments, and sometimes in my dreams. I go on scribbling and typing because it’s the only thing I’ve ever been halfway good at; because it’s what I believe I was put on earth to do.