Words: The Pieces and Parts of Writing

Start with 26 letters. Remember when we learned them at 2, 3, or 4 years of age? Do you still sing the tune when you need to alphabetize something?

Now, turn those 26 tiny pieces into 171,476 entries (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), or shall we say bigger pieces, or maybe we just call them words.

That’s a lot of pieces that maybe you turn them into a sentence, and the sentence turns into a paragraph. And with enough paragraphs, you fill a page. You only need one page to create a chapter. String enough chapters together and you might create a book. Or if you don’t have that much to say, you can still stay it as a poem, or maybe a song.

Could you, do it?

Have you ever?

Words alone have one meaning, like baby, love, or cookie. But together, “My baby loves cookies,” becomes something more specific and invokes an image. I know you saw a big, round baby eating a cookie. Admit it. You saw them, smelled them, and heard them giggle in delight.

To write, to pull images and words from your mind to paper, to invoke feelings, good or bad. It’s what writers live for, it’s the passion that drives them. It’s been my dream since I read my first Nancy Drew mystery.

My seven-year-old self was so inspired by those stories that I wanted to do more than read the words; I wanted to create those sensory emotions that words invoke. To create worlds and characters with just a stroke of a pen or the click of the keyboard.

It didn’t end there for me. I craved more, and read more. From Nancy Drew to Judy Blume, they were no longer words in a book, but rather lovingly pull through a story. An ebb and flow of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books.

Pieces and parts. Humans use words to explain, to heal, to hurt, to love, to feel. It makes us alive and colorful, and full.

They’re more than letters and more than words. They are everything.