Little Essay-thing

[icarus_chained]

T

Building in Liquids

What is it like to write?

 

Words are ... an experience. Tactile. Sensory. Complete. Words have shape and form and texture, they flow and move, they taste and whisper and smell. Words have meaning, an expression almost beyond that which they strive to hold. Words are an extra layer over reality, an extra piquancy to life. To describe something in words is to add to it, to give both the thing and the word, the thing described and the act of description both. Words complete the world.

 

It's hard to describe, the layers of sensation I feel in words. Like the soft, grey weight of both, or the sensual intrigue of dexterous. Words have colour, like the startling gold of fierce. And flavour, like the spice of burn or the cool bite of brittle. They have sound, like the gorgeously expressive gloop, which sounds for all the world like a drop of water slowly gathering on a tap, and dropping. GllOop!

 

Most of all though, words have texture and feeling, weight and motion. When I speak or write, I can feel them, tumbling and running, stately, shaped and aimed and flowing. Like dexterous, crooked and smooth, with the faint burr of velvet. Or clockwork, so sharp and upright and brassy, a drop of weight. And honour, narrow and tall, and like solidified cloud, nebulous and firm. And more, especially when you string the words together.

 

That's the art of writing, of speaking. To combine the sensations of words, to combine flavour and texture and shape, so that they alter each other, shape each other by proximity (a skinny, rather insidious little word, by the way), to make a new shape, the shape of an idea. Together, words tumble in streams and arcs and lightning forks. It feels like building in liquids, like pouring words together into castles and towers and crystalline bridges of meaning, of expression. You can build people that way, characters, people built of words and flavoured meaning, shimmering and indescribably beautiful. Writing is creation, raw and pure and simple.

 

That's the other thing, of course. If ordinary, everyday words are an extra layer over reality, adding to it, then the words of imagination, describing the landscapes and worlds visible only to the mind's eye ... they bring them here. They draw them raw over the air of this world, filled with colour and texture and life. They bring those worlds here, draw them down, show them to everyone here who has never seen them.

 

Writing like that, it wraps words around distant worlds, distant people, cushions them, cradles them in tactile presence, and reveals them for everyone who doesn't see the way I do. Words, language, that's what they were designed for. To communicate, to reveal, to texture and solidify a thought. But they can do that for worlds too. They can make worlds. Make people. And the experience of doing that, what it feels like to weave those words, to build those worlds, to draw those people, to create that translation to reality of something nebulous and distant ... that is why I write. Because of what that feels like. That pride, that love, that raw, fierce energy. All of it.

 

That is what words mean to me. That is what it is like to write.

 

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