AnonymousI’ve just turned twenty. And I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t really think of myself as a writer. I just… write. You know? But thank you. I think it has to do with how I feel about words, how I’ve always loved the feel of a book in my hands, the sweet vanilla perfume of their pages as I turn them. Stephen King said that if one wants to be a writer, you have to start with the basics. Read. I’ve been reading nearly all of my life and this is probably the most crucial thing when it comes down to whether you’re going to be able to write well or not. My hunger for books is, at the worst of times, insatiable. I know that might sound silly. But I can’t always get enough. Words are so beautiful and I get into these moods where I need to clothe myself in them and I swear sometimes even my skin will smell like them. Like pages. Like words. But read. You need to see how other people use words, what their relationship to them is, how you feel about words. I’ve read more books than I can count, enough books to fill a nicely sized living room or den. I’ve reread things and then have come back not hours later to read them again. I’ve written out favorite parts of books two, three, sometimes five or six times. This is also helpful. Close your eyes and pretend you’ve written it. Open them. You try. Write something every day. Even if it’s just a bit of a conversation you heard in the store or what you had for lunch or what the weather was like or what you wore or keep a journal of some tiny thing for an entire month. Tiny, you understand. We all know about love, about war, about babies and how good they smell after baths. We all know how human bodies have this way of fitting together, no matter if its an elbow in a palm or a chin on a thigh. Describe tiny things, like how light hits a spoon or the sound leaves make when it’s windy. It’s like drawing. Paper is still your canvas but words are your charcoal, your watercolors, your graphite. Make it your goal to learn a new word every day. They don’t have to be fancy words no one’s ever heard of, but look up definitions to things you aren’t quite sure about. Get a library card. Go weekly, even if it’s just to pick a corner in the back to sit in and hold a book in your hands and run your fingers over its edges for fifteen minutes. Surround yourself with words. Yours, other people’s, everyone’s. It will come to you. Everyone has something beautiful to say.
