The Pleasurely Craft

Writing is a sweet and gentle consolation, just as reading is; it has the ability to gladden the heart, and challenge the mind, and in the final analysis, it provides boundless personal satisfaction. Even when one does not need to be consoled, one does require a challenge for the mind, lest it grow creaky from disuse.

Writing, almost as much as reading, is, for people that way inclined, as necessary as breathing. Without it we are unfulfilled. Bereft of a certain potential. Those bitten by that writing bug have a need to express themselves, to relay, in the language of choice, a narrative of their experiences, whether in real-time language, or as creative fiction.

And so it is with me. And I can identify the initial spark in my granddaughter. In her love for the written word, and the inexhaustible resource that reading represents. Knowledge and entertainment, along with her own need to express her personal perceptions from the mind of a growing child, with a growing realization of the world around her, and the individuals who people that world.

I take huge pleasure in writing, and it makes my heart skip to see hers. It is so wonderfully redolent of an awakening, intelligent mind eager to know more. In her I see myself. The search for meaningful intelligence, for an understanding of everything that surrounds us, the nature of the universe and our place in it; the nature of humankind in all its puzzling manifestations.

Pictures, it is said, are worth a thousand words, and that may very well be so. I write, often, of gardening, of the escape to the garden, to work with nature and assemble a palette and shapes that landscape my world. I have written, set down my thoughts, absorbed myself in the written expression since I was a child.

And always, uppermost in mind was the thought how wonderful it would be to be a writer; not a casual writer, but one dedicated to the craft. It is in the human spirit to wish for validation, recognition of one's effort. There are few who attain that height of recognition for the creativeness of one's mind's efforts in expressing ideas that others take delight in, or respect for their originality.

It is, people who write so often moan, a lonely avocation, or a profession in whose interests of achievement, the writer struggles and meets the adversity of a reluctant muse, unwilling to be awakened from her comfortable nap, simply to satisfy the longings of a writer-born. There was indeed a time that I thought of writing as isolating, but isolation is a requisite for assembling thoughts to convey through the written word.

That kind of isolation, temporary as it is, enables the writer, through gentle concentration to evoke memories, to recall visions, to bring together experience and observation to create another kind of reality. There is nothing spare about my mode of expression; I tend toward verbosity. Why express oneself pithily, when an extravagant gush of words can accomplish the same thing?

Tedious and tiresome to the reader, perhaps, but sheer joy of expression to me. As a writer, one known only to myself, uncelebrated in the world of scribes, unknown to the public, I satisfy my self, my inner urge to craft, create and express myself. Writer's block? What is that? There has never been a time when I have been at a loss for words, unable to call up expressions, viewpoints, perceptions.

Scribacious am I.