The task of assembling words to orchestrate an idea and momentarily hold a reader captive to one’s thoughts is quite daunting, isn’t it? For a few minutes, you have to get under your readers’ skin, dismantle their most skeptical walls, and let them surrender to your authored dictatorship. In a number of ways, you govern their heads, their hearts even; you assault them with curious superlatives, cities they’ve never seen, strange occurrences they’ve never encountered, and thoughts they have never cradled.
We write to express, to impress: That’s a given. However, what we constantly fail to realize is how we are afforded the ability to create worlds with our craft. Forget heralding people to different dimensions, we’re given the possibility of building little universes out of nothing but a masterful arrangement of vowels and consonants. At the most, we are given but fragments of thought, raw emotions, and an intense willingness to experience movement with our hands, to flow. But really, that’s all you ever do need to start and eventually behold a brainchild of the written kind.
People will tell you that writing is commonplace and that if it possesses any incredible substance, it is reserved for professors, scholars, and literature students. Let me tell you differently. Get lost in the whimsical swirls and sways of words, marry rhyme and reason with your phrases. Re-imagine the believed nature of a story and how, if it isn’t only good for bedtime, then it’s too complicated to bother with.
Fall in love with writing and revel in your ability to tell a story that can make others feel, that can disturb their previously still surfaces and provoke their curiosities. Spur their creativity by allowing them entrance to your own mind, and let them see a woman the way you’d see her (do her brown eyes startle you or perhaps leave you with coupled breaths?), offer them careful adjectives that may aid them to grasp her flesh the way you celebrate it.
Create a world, allow others to briefly take residence as their eyes scan your work, and finally, leave them heavily compelled to build one of their own.
Meg Manzano, 22, is in pursuit of a life of constant deadlines and bylines. She lives under southern skies.