Where would we be without words? They can build someone up or bring them crashing to the ground. Words educate, inspire, encourage, bring hope, despair and destruction. Words can be a powerful tool or a dreadful weapon.
Authors and avid readers live for where the “words” are taking them next. We go to imaginary worlds, relive the life of someone long gone, root for the downtrodden, despise the villain, visit the future, the past and live vicariously through the characters. Written words make us think and feel. Only limited by the writer’s imagination.
Authors take their words and weave them into magic. Taking us on twist and turns, providing mystery, humor, fear, joy, pain, tears, hope, laughter and anger. All authors strive to do just that but some just seem naturally gifted. Some I think were born to write, for the rest of us we read and learn. Stephen King said “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
Only through reading, experimenting, correcting and crafting can we grow. As a new author, I am learning and will continue to learn through reading. I have published two books and currently working on my third while working to improve every day.
If we thought out our words when speaking as carefully as when writing the world would be a brighter place. I am saddened by how many waste their words on negative things. Words are a gift for us to use to produce something of use, not to be wasted.
The wisdom that comes with age gives us pause, makes us think before we speak, listen to other’s words, learn new things and open new doors. Sometimes it is just best to listen and not to speak.
If you put ten people in a room and give them the exact same story to read, you will receive a very diverse response to the individual’s perception of the story. Our personalities and cultural beliefs also determine how we perceive words. A writer faces this dilemma in storytelling. Some readers will love your story, some will hate it, others just are not “into it”. We cannot all fit in one box, thankfully, otherwise it would be a boring world in which only certain stories were written. As both a reader and a writer reaching outside our normal preferences sometime brings great rewards.
Recently, to support other authors, I have read books that I normally would have scrolled on by, thank heavens I gave them a try. Some of these works, both fiction and nonfiction, have enlightened me, entertained me, inspired me and gave new thought process to preconceived opinions. Experimenting with words can only enrich us personally and professionally.
I would like to give a shout out to some of those authors that I feel reached the goal of using their words to take me on a journey, Diana J. Febry, Paulette Mahurin, Christopher A. Lay and Todd Lawson La Tourette. I would highly recommend reading their work, all very talented authors but each one totally different in subject matter.
My dilemma is that there are too many talented authors out there for me to reap the rewards of all they have to offer but I will continue to read as many as I can and grow my own words. Reading is the only way we can journey to some places, some real, some imagined and make friends with the most amazing characters.
Perhaps today might be the day you decide to read a book by an unknown author who has a journey to take you on.
Happy reading everyone. Be kind, be happy and love life!
My pleasure.