The Possibility of Words

A vague memory will surface from time to time of when I was about four or five years old, and my mother was teaching me how to read. I can recall the annoyance and frustration my four-year-old self felt of being "forced" to do such tedious work as stringing the sounds of letters together to make words. Now, of course, I feel nothing but gratitude for her dodged patience and persistence, because I find that I have fallen in love with the written word. I love the possibility that exists within them. I love feeling that a blank page is like a canvas, and that the words I put on it create a painting. I love the thrill of opening a new book and not knowing where the words will take me, and the thrill of opening an old book and being able to take the journey again.

Words can create and destroy. They can soothe and rile. They can pull forth the entire range of human emotion, and paint vistas that are beautiful or ugly, and every possibility in between. Words can take the reader to far off and exotic places - whether they exist in reality or not. They can bring the past to life, or illuminate a future. Combined skillfully, words can walk the reader down the corridor of a medieval castle, or the mud strewn ruts of a peasant village. They can send you soaring into the sky on the backs of dragons and plunge you into the abyss of the ocean. Words can be beautiful, mundane, startling, bold, evasive, dangerous...everything is a possibility.

This, perhaps, is why I love writing so much. I dabbled in it as a child, creating poems and ballads, but not until I graduated from university did I begin to devote time to it in earnest, and it has quickly become a passion.

Because that is what I love - I love to create things.

To weave pictures and paint words.