Guest blog by Bill McDonald
“Whatever you write down will be important even if it is only important to you.”
In the novel Strangers in Time by David Baldacci, there is a tender moment that stayed with me. Mr. Oliver, sensing something special in Charlie, gives him an empty journal that once belonged to his deceased wife and later lends him one of her ink pens. As he does, he tells him, “Whatever you write down will be important even if it is only important to you.”
The line landed with unusual force. It did not feel like advice meant only for a fictional boy living through wartime London. It felt like advice meant for anyone who has ever wondered whether their words matter. For me, that question has taken on new shape since retiring in September 2025.
Retirement created a space that had not previously existed in my life: time to think, time to read carefully, and time to write. Since then, I have completed several writing projects, each one emerging from curiosity, reflection, and a desire to better understand the world around me. In a quiet way, writing became one of the ways I began to take stock of a life that had already accumulated many decades of experience.
Who Is the Audience?
Yet whenever people ask about these projects, the same question often appears: Who is the audience? What is the purpose? Beneath the question lies a familiar assumption in our culture—that writing only justifies itself if it quickly finds a sufficient readership or immediate public recognition.
The wisdom expressed in that quiet exchange between Mr. Oliver and Charlie offers a different framework for thinking about writing. Writing can possess value long before it finds an audience, and sometimes regardless of whether it ever does. Narrative, after all, begins long before there is an audience. Its first purpose is internal, not public. To write is, in a sense, to exist narratively.
Writing Gathers Our Experiences
Human beings do not simply accumulate experiences; over time they gather those experiences into stories that allow them to understand who they are. Writing becomes one of the ways we participate in the slow work of assembling a self. When we write, we clarify our own thoughts, preserve moments that might otherwise disappear, and give shape to reflections that would remain fleeting if left only in memory.
For this reason, writing also functions as a counterweight to erasure. Without some form of narrative expression, much of what we experience simply vanishes into the passage of time. A thought occurs, an observation is made, a realization briefly surfaces—and then it is gone.
Writing interrupts that disappearance. It records the moment and gives it a durable form. The opposite of narrative is not silence but chaos: a scattering of impressions with no structure that allows them to be understood. Narrative gathers those fragments and arranges them into meaning.
Writing as an Attempt to Understand One’s Life
This is exactly what happens when someone writes later in life as well. After decades of living, reading, working, and observing, a person carries within them an enormous accumulation of impressions and reflections. Writing becomes the means by which those fragments are gradually organized into a narrative that makes sense of the whole. In this way writing is part of the deeply human process of integrating a life.
At seventy years old, writing has therefore become more than an activity of passing interest. It is part of the ongoing effort to understand a life as a whole.
Human beings become who they are through the narratives they construct about their experiences, and writing provides one of the most deliberate ways of participating in that process. Each page becomes a small act of assembly—gathering memory, reflection, and observation into a form that can be seen and considered. In that sense, writing allows a life not merely to be lived but to be understood.
The journal Mr. Oliver gives Charlie once belonged to someone who had lived before him, and that detail carries a quiet symbolism. One life leaves traces that another life may one day discover. Writing participates in that same continuity. Words written today may never travel far beyond the moment of their creation—or they may one day reach someone unexpectedly, perhaps years or decades later. The writer rarely controls that outcome.
The Decision to Write Honestly
What can be controlled is the decision to write honestly and attentively. In that sense, the value of writing does not ultimately depend on the size of its audience but on the seriousness of the act itself. Each page becomes a small declaration that thought, memory, and reflection deserve to be preserved.
Mr. Oliver’s advice to Charlie therefore speaks far beyond the boundaries of the novel. It reminds us that writing is one of the ways a human life refuses to disappear unnoticed. To write is to say that the experiences one has lived, the questions one has struggled with, and the insights one has gathered are worthy of being set down.
Sometimes the audience may be the writer alone, seeking clarity. Sometimes it may be a reader years from now who happens upon the words and recognizes something of their own life within them. Either way, the act remains meaningful. The page receives the trace of a life thinking about itself—and that, in the end, is reason enough to write.
Bill McDonald Bio
Bill McDonald is a retired small business owner with over 40 years’ experience. He holds a Master of Arts in Religion from Ashland Theological Seminary. In retirement, he devotes time to reading, thinking, and writing about human beings and the concrete realities that shape their lives. He has been married for 51 years and has three children and five grandchildren. He enjoys books, playing guitar, walking in the woods on the acreage where he lives, and good conversation with friends and family.
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