Wednesday, January 20, 2010

words are precious

If you have never sat wistfully before your laptop, drudging for words to say the thing that itches inside you, if you haven't known a story you want to tell yet you forget what everything is called... if you haven't known that world of numb silence colored with opaque images that flood in your mind, if you haven't yet known the incapacity of just saying ... well there are things we find no language for, then you will never understand and appreciate the preciousness of words.

But I am not scared when I know I have a story to tell. Words may flee. I will cogitate. Words may flee. I will gaze on things in their world... in that single world where they become beautiful, the world without which they cease to be what they are.

Words are precious. If you use them wrong they suggest something else. Bad! If you use them anyhow, just anyhow, they irritate the ears of your audience. Catastrophic. If you use them without knowing what they are, the battle comes back to you... Hmmmm. See what I mean?

I have been searching for words. I have been on this laptop for almost an hour. I have written five pages. I have deleted five pages. But there are remnants of those syllables that echo in my memory. What I have written and deleted, what has touched the silent part of my being is the finesse of all I could try to say. I have come to realize this, that writing is a passion, but it is also vision. It is about something that is desperately writhing inside us, willing to come out. But it is also about the ability to see that thing in its beauty. That is the way it is to me. The passion is the tension towards the thing and the vision if the principle that defines and names that thing. That is what accomplishes writing.

That said, I move to chapter five of my novel. And I don't know if I will end up with 5 deleted pages. Whatever it is, there is this echo that remains, the echo that reminds me of the untold story.

1 comment:

  1. Reading this as I commit to reorganizing my novel and writing a whole set of chapters to go in the middle. The words leave an echo even when deleted.

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