Words

I love words. As a writer, I spend a lot of time playing with words, and I don't just mean stringing them together to make a sentence. I also like to look at the letters, and see how they work together to create the words. Some letters look and sound soft, S for example, while others, like K, look and sound rather harsh. To me, a word written on a piece of paper is visual art. This is likely why I have so much fun buying notebooks and why I get such a rush out of writing. Not only am I creating an image through words, giving my reader an impression of my thoughts on something, or of my creative process, but I am also creating an image with ink on a piece of paper.

This dual act of creation fascinates me. I can't get enough of it. People sometimes ask me where I get my inspiration for my writing, and I can never really find a way to phrase it. I play with words. Sometimes I can pick a word, a single word, and think about it for a very, very long time, sometimes so long that when it is a title for a piece I am working on, I come to doubt that it is the right word. Is it possible that I might have picked a word close enough to the one I want to confuse myself? Given how much time I spend writing, the chances that I could mix up a few words here and there are both extremely high, and extremely low. I know enough words to be bound to mix them once in a while, but I play with them enough that I can always manage to catch it when I do so.

I am always amazed by the structure of the words we use, and I hope you will stay with me while I look at two of my favorite examples of this. Faith, and Fuck.

Faith, when taken as a word and separated from its meaning, is a very soft word. There are no c's or k's or q't or hard t's in it to create a harsh sound. It is pleasant to say, and to hear. It's almost seductive in it's softness. Faith is the kind of word you want to say, purely because it's nice. This is a pleasurable word, and has been given an equally pleasant meaning to match.

Fuck, on the other hand, is a very rough word, even though it starts with the same letter. U is an awkward vowel when left on its own, and the combination with the F means that we must pronounce the F differently than we would for Faith. The F becomes a harder letter than it might have been otherwise. The C and K are sharp. These are pointy letters in look and sound. Even when separated from it's meaning, Fuck is a harsh word, and so it the meaning it has been given fits it very well.

This is how my mind words when I write. I think about words, their sounds, their meanings, how I think the two match up. This only gets more complex when I start to look at words that have been put together. Here I have to reference another Movie, purely because it is where most people have encountered this. Donnie Darko features a scene in which the phrase Cellar Door is noted as having been declared by J.R.R. Tolkein as the most beautiful pairing of words in the English language. While I may not be able to read most of Tolkein's work because of it's detail and my lack of a suitable attention span, I have to agree with him on this. I'll spare you my own deconstruction, and if you like, I'm sure you can look it up and find his.

What I mean to say with this is that I don't understand my writing process. I pick up a pen, I start to draw some shapes. These shapes come out as letters, which in turn come out as words, which then becomes sentences. The sentences tell the story of what I see in my head, what I watch like a movie in the back of my mind. I do not draw the image directly, because I cannot move the pen that way, but I do what I can, and I love it.

In a few of my pieces I have equated the act of writing to playing god. I can create a world, bring it to life on the page, and then go and do whatever I want with it. I have total freedom when I write, so I spend a lot of time doing it. Wouldn't you?

Lisa

"I live in my own world, but it's okay, they know me here."