I’ve loved words ever since I picked up a book to read when I was six or seven years old. After I opened that book and began to read, I was lost in the worlds that I found in Enid Blyton stories; and have often spent my time reading since. My brother and I were given a huge old cardboard box full of old paperbacks which used to belong to my older cousins. Franklin W Dixon’s Hardy Boys, Carolyn Keene’s inquisitive Nancy, and many other old stories kept me enthralled and gripped as the yellowed pages flowed with adventure and excitement. It seemed as if anything could be done, if only you could imagine it, and write it down. I remember thinking to myself when I was eight, that I wanted to be an `author’. I didn’t know a lot then about what an author did. I thought that End Blyton spent her days working hard, hunched over a desk as she wrote on large sheets of clean paper with dark ink out of a quill. It sounded great fun, merely sitting down and writing stories that came to my mind. I decided then that that was what I wanted to do.
I’ve been writing since I was eight. The spelling of my first attempt was horrible and so was my writing, but constant work has definitely improved all of this. Sometimes I write right after I’ve been struck by a strong wave of emotion, or after I’ve realised something that I didn’t think about before. Then, I can’t wait to grab a sheet of paper and a pencil to see what I might write.
I’ve spent hours and hours writing away my thoughts on lined sheets of paper. Sometimes when I start, I feel like the possibilities are endless. One thought follows another and I often end up writing on a variety of topics that I haven’t thought about in a while. I might start talking about how my day went, to something silly someone did on that day, to what she told me that day, and refer it to something else she’d said on a similar topic on another day. I’d go about in entire circles and find myself with a full page of scribbles after 20 minutes. And when I reread what I’d
written, I find myself expressing ideas in ways that I didn’t think about consciously. As if I’d just written down something and found a truth in myself that I didn’t know I had.When I write, I often have the next word in my mind. I’d watch my pen dance and form alphabets across the lines, slowly marking down my unique thoughts into a system that someone else can interpret and read. That is something that is so wonderfully captivating about writing. How you may somehow write something, and if worded perfectly, it would capture the essence of the emotion that you were trying to create. If one exact word was wrong, or the sentence was not fluent and did not flow, the writing was crippled and needed the help of a good dictionary or a thesaurus. Sometimes, I would ask to read my friend’s journals or compositions. And I’m still floored at how many people just write without structure or regard for the proper word or the appropriate usage of a certain shade of meaning. I suppose that not many people may understand this love.
Everywhere you go, you see words. You refer to books, newspapers, watch words fly in advertisements and decorate television screens. You see alphabets when you turn on your computer, look at reminders on your refrigerators or on notepads. Words and its humble components, alphabets, are like little magic playthings that have this ability to create anything that you wanted. You could create emotion, money (in advertising), record a thought forever, an entire world in 50,000 words, write a dialogue that would show you how people think, how people see this world. Words are like the life source of ever idea and every thought that comes into being the moment you think it. You need words to express emotion. How far could you go with hand gestures? Could all of the waving and gesticulating and grunting compel your friend to feel exactly the same way if either of you couldn’t talk or read and write?
Sometimes I pick up a pen and look at the blank sheet, I feel like I’m coming home. I’d write away, and surrender to the familiarity of being slumped over a desk as my right hand flies across the page. On other days, when I confront the computer screen, I type away merely to hear the continuous tapping of keys being punched. (I think that having a silent keyboard on a laptop will be a living nightmare.)
The charm of writing is that when you write out something that you’re really proud of, you get hooked. You start wondering if you’re able to do that again. Soon you find yourself writing away at everything and nothing, typing out words onto a screen that don’t mean a thing until you clean up the whole act and start over. The challenge is to be able to write exactly what you mean, to convey your thoughts with clarity to the reader to evoke the emotion that you want to portray. You may become the slave to your Autocorrect on your computer, or the owner of a well-thumbed dictionary, chasing nuances and meanings to see if you’ve chosen the correct word for your sentence. Yet the beauty and flaw of writing is that it is not an exact science. This means that you never stop learning.
And then when you finally start, and begin to fall in love with the simple matter of allowing your thoughts to gel and create words, you learn the joys of a secret that many writers know. You learn what it is like to create your world. You cry and laugh at the characters you see and mold and give birth to. You know why one particular character has a quirky way of smiling, or why another is shy of birds. You would love the ease of greeting these characters and your words as you watch them grow day by day. Or if you may never turn your hand to creating characters, you’ll start of a journey of searching and exploration. You may never know that you’d felt that way about an issue until you wrote it down. It is a path where you watch yourself grow and mature and think.
How interesting it is, that simple tools such as words could create this pleasure. Yet we forget how selfish we may be. In my anger, if I ever wrote a letter to the person I was mad at, I may regret it forever or be scalded by shame for ever admitting I felt like that. Words are not like little playthings that may be used for pain or gain or show. In a writer’s hands, words are just symbols that need to be rearranged to mean something. If we who love words so are able to create wonders with them, let us stop there. There is no joy is spreading hurt of malice, and no place for spite in a decent letter.
I remember thinking right before I turned on this computer, that I meant to write a journal about how much I love writing. And when I read back, these paragraphs have walked me down memories and reminded me of thoughts that I’d forgotten about. I’ve just spent an hour dedicating this to you, my reader. I didn’t know that I would finish this essay this way, or that the words I’ve written would write themselves this easily. Through the simple act of reading this, you and I share an experience unique because I may never write another essay like this, and you will never be able to read this essay again, for the first time.(by Krystal Duflair)
Wow.
Reblogged from paradoxicalove.
"Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too."
