World Building with Words
I've been procrastinating about writing a blog post all week. It's the summer holidays here and after a week staying at my brother's holiday house in the warm, sunny Bay of Islands here in NZ, I'm having a great deal of trouble shifting back into work mode. I expect you're supposed to come back from holiday all refreshed and raring to go but the only place I want to go is back on holiday!
It's been a year now since I started this blog and uploaded the first of my stories for people to read. What an incredible year it's been too. I've met some fantastic people, had a lot of fun being a pretty productive writer, even received fan mail – which completely floored me – and decided to start this year head down and bum up writing furiously.
But the best laid plans and all that didn't take into account an unexpected offer of a holiday in the sun and coming home feeling like doing pretty much anything but putting words on the page one after the other and hoping that they're in the right order.
Why does it feel like such a big deal to start writing a new book? Probably because it actually is. It takes an awful lot of commitment to start writing a novel, knowing that you are going to be sitting down to it almost every day for the next few months and looking that blank page in the eye, knowing you and only you are responsible for putting all those squiggly little letters upon it. Letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, all of which have to say so much more than what they actually mean.
Writing is an imprecise exercise. No matter how you try, a word is never going to encompass the entire meaning you want it to. At best it only approximates the object, vision, idea you have in your head. Fancy going into a job with your only tools being an alphabet full of letters and a language full of words, none of which can possibly mean everything you want them too. They're slippery little buggers, words – anyone who has ever tried to write poetry can attest to that one. And yet, we build whole worlds out of them.
What an amazing thing to do – build whole worlds just with words. No bricks, mortar, wood, hammer, nails. Only words. Thinking about it makes me shiver. With awe, fear and a delicious sense of possibility.
Starting is always the hardest part of any new endeavour, I suspect. But now that I'm really thinking about it, I find myself wanting to turn to that blank page and start filling it in. Because I can build whole worlds, just with those little, imprecise, slippery things called words. I can sit in a room on my own, making things up, and after a while, I can show you this new world I built and invite you to stay a while in there with me.
I love my job.
I think I'll write the first page of my new story right now.
Filed under: Writing Journal
