Why I Like To Do Things With Words
By Billy Dean
I was born in the city but grew up in the country where I discovered that words could take me beyond my five senses. That insight began on a hike in the woods with my father. We had stopped to watch bees buzzing around wildflower along the trail. I knew the bees were gathering honey but wondered what else was going on. When we got home, my curiosity led me to a library where I discovered it wasn't a one-way affair. Those flowers were gathering pollen from the bees. It was fun to watch bees buzzing from flower to flower, but it was reading words in a book that transformed my watching into understanding. Bees do things to flowers, flowers do things to bees, and words do things to me, so I want to do things with words.
Now, with the years piled on top of each other like pages in a book, I'm more aware of why I write and why it matters. Some reasons are personal and some are public, but they all stem from my desire to do something with words. And knowing the reasons helps me identify my intended readers and how I can reach them. Each of my reasons has a different audience—me when the reason is personal and others when the reason is public.
My Personal Reasons
To Understand Myself. What's magical about writing for personal reasons is that I don't know what I think or feel until I read what I've written. Without reflection, the history of our lives is just a string of incidents connected by the passage of time. Like salmon swimming upstream, we get so immersed in the busyness of life we don't see how the circumstances we encountered and the choices we made became a story with a plot and a point. I transform memories into memoirs to unlock the door to yesterday. Every sentence I write moves me closer to things that mattered in the past and will, therefore, matter in the future.
To Earn a Living. Writing played a crucial role in my career. My job required me to write reports and instructional manuals so other men and women could do their jobs. Good writing reflects good thinking, and my employers noticed.
My Public Reasons
To Express My Creativity. Writing brings my imagination out to play with prose and poetry where my imagination carries my creativity into the hearts and minds of others. Storytellers need to express their creativity, and readers need the stories they tell. Why? Because stories can teach us things about ourselves. “Stories live in our bones and blood,” wrote Patti Davis, “follow the seasons, and light candles on the darkest nights. Storytellers know they are also teachers.”
In a library, for example, there are zillions of stories to be discovered because writers put their creativity into words in a book. Pull one off a shelf. Open it and turn to a page. Can you hear the author struggling to find just the right words for you, his reader? Some of those authors published their writing when the Egyptians were building pyramids. Some when the Greeks were discovering science and art. Some in the Dark Ages when mankind turned away from science and art. Some during the Renaissance when men and women returned to art and science. Some just a year ago. It doesn’t matter where or when. Those writers are still alive in the words they wrote for you. Be a space-time traveler. Let their creative imagination carry you to once upon a time in a land far away where their storytelling insights can change your perspective on everything that has occupied the heads, hearts and hands of men and women throughout the ages.
To Entertain, Inform and Inspire. Writing is a way to share my creativity, my knowledge and my experience with others. My favorite way to do that is to be a storyteller. Some people think stories are just an entertaining way to escape reality. We live in a world with problems that are often beyond our ability to solve, so it can be reassuring to read a story with problems we know will be solved by the hero in the end. But storytelling can be faction, a blend of fact and fiction, if authors seed their imagination with what they know about the real world. Fiction can also be a powerful way to change reality, and that empowers us to find something true about ourselves. We become the young hero, the wise old woman, the boy who becomes a man because the story is psychologically valid, emotionally realistic and loaded with clues for shaping and navigating the sticky web of real life.
To Save My Self for Posterity. I get more pleasure from writing when I know that somebody is reading what I've written, so I seek publication of my writing in the hope that I can leave something of myself in the hearts and minds of my readers.
To Perfect the Process. I love the process of brainstorming an idea, then researching, writing, editing and polishing it to create clear, concise, finely-tuned poetry and prose, and whether I do or do not find an audience for my writing, I’m glad I made the effort to do something creative with words.
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Your Reasons to be Creative with Words
Writing without a motive and a purpose in mind is like driving without a route and a destination. The journey will be like Yogi Bera's mindless "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!" rather than Robert Frost's mindful "I took the road less traveled and that made all the difference." So find a quiet place to plumb the depths of why you want to be a storyteller and the effect you want your stories to have on your readers. Seed your thoughts with the understanding that you can satisfy your desire to do something creative with words if you transform your writer-centered motives into a reader-centered outcome. Then go home and write a story that reflects Ray Bradbury's advice to “let the best and worst things in your life--your passion and your prejudice--hit the page like a lightning bolt." Write because you have something to say, not because you want to say something.