I think there is a strange kind of comfort in words.
Set out on a page they lie in orderly rows, like Lego bricks pieced together in the wall of a house. When you write them down they speak back to you in your own voice, a sort of shallow echo which you can mould and shape with every edit and correction.
Words don’t pass judgement on you. If misplaced, a word will sit patiently, blinking at you like a car wanting to turn through your right of way, waiting for you to pass it by and set it on its rightful course down a side street towards a half-finished metaphor.
Some words are bouncy and jittery and unleash a flood of other words behind them in a flurry of adventure, like the sparkles trailing behind a magic carpet bound for a faraway land. Others are stately and sedate, eloquently tying up loose ends and bringing weary ships back safely to solid shore.
Carefully selected words can illuminate a tenuous mystery, pouring light on murky shadows till it fills all the cracks and gaps.
Alternately, words can throw a sentence wholly off-balance, a lance in the chest of a jousting knight, bringing a whole train of thought to a chaotic crashing halt.
What all words seem to have in common is a dependence on sequence. Rare and few are those words which can strike it alone, free from the supportive scaffolding of a set-up, quantifier or closer. As these strings of words flit through space, pairing and entwining with others like DNA helixes, they form the identity of a story.
Some of these genes are common; the blue eyes and grey nights in neon-splashed cities, the unkempt workaholic detective and the smooth business criminal whose empire comes crashing down in a rush to the last page.
Others are recessive and subterranean; the product of a chance meiosis, forming a brilliantly twisted antihero who toys with our head and heart. These tales seldom end neatly, instead leaving us anguished and hustled, yet we were so comprehensively cheated by our puppeteering author we can but smile and wonder.
And what of our writers? They wrestle and sweat and dodge and weave, hoping one day to break through to a clarity of vision and meaning and purpose which has always escaped them, each with their green flickering light at the end of their pier across the bay.
And one day, one day, our time will come.
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