In Love With Words

I have always been in love with words. 'Look' was the first word I learned to read and spell in kindergarten. It was the word key that unlocked the treasure chest of vocabulary and lead to my passions for dictionaries and thesauruses of which I have a fairly large collection still. In high school I read the Webster's dictionary (the paperback version) because I was a sponge with a thirst for new words.

When I write I listen to the words, how they flow, the rhythm and patterns they make in the listener's ear. I not only want to create beautiful and striking images with words, I want to also create tympani, crescendos, glissades...music with words. I don't always achieve this, but I do sometimes completely halt the forward progression of a story while prowling through a thesaurus to find the perfect word to complete a word mosaic, to complete a visual image, or to finish a little piece of verbal music. It's like swirling raspberry jam into cream of wheat and making a lovely, vivid, spiral pattern.

The page is a blank canvas, the keyboard the medium employed to paint that canvas with beautiful imagery. But sometimes raw ugliness splatters the canvas in the shocking colors of blood and gore. That is what writing is- exploring all the avenues in life- those both lovely and grim.

I try to grasp the reader by the hand from page one and draw them into the story. From there they can proceed at their own pace. Like an art gallery I litter the pages with images. Like a group session in the psych ward I also strew emotions along the path.

Texting and posting make me cringe...it's like walking through a word butcher's shop surveying verbal carnage-letters, conjunctions, prepositions, spelling, grammar all trimmed away leaving raw bones with very little meat upon them. I don't like reading gristle and scraps. I want to read a piece of prose marbled with fat like a thirty dollar steak- flavorful, delicious, filling- a delight to sink one's teeth into and savor.

I should have been born in the 1800's when authors literally painted the page with dense verbage.