Words.  Little shapes strategically scattered across paper drawn in ink, graphite, pigment, or blood.

Words.  Tiny characters that build dreams, establish worlds, and birth new life.

Words.  Creation and destruction defined together on a single piece of parchment.

Words are to be honored, dissected, and savored when writing.  As a writer, each word should be delicately plucked from a vast vocabulary and laid out within prose to give rise to imagination.  Writing should be a laborious, intense journey to script the perfect literary concoction.

Writing is an art of dexterity, cognition, and inspiration.

Creatively, I am a very slow writer.  Plots, scenes, and characters actively swirl through my mind, but it takes me weeks to complete a 10,000-word story.  My lack of speed is due to the constant analysis of each word snared from my brain’s lexicon.  Daintily, I set each word in place to structure my tale.  Once a draft is complete, the contents of the entire text are re-analyzed.  Each word and phrase boil within the sacred space of my mind where a bodiless voice continually asks, “how else can this be phrased?” or “what other superlative word can be used?”

I am known as a logophile: a lover of words.

I do not persistently revise my stories because I am a perfectionist; it is because I am never content with the final words that are chosen.  The innumerable possibilities of sentences haunt my mind, terrorizing my psyche that there is always another way to have my plots / ideas / scenes / characters portrayed.  I ache for the agonizing process of culling words.  The practice is my addiction.

There is an estimated 1,019,729 words in the English languages, and an unfathomable number of those words are synonyms.  Yet, each individual word evokes its own sense and beauty.

For instance, macabre has a higher degree of elegance than say ghastly or nightmarish.   Macabre evokes terror, yet retains a grandeur that the other two adjectives of horror lack.  I read into each word, tasting it on my tongue, balancing it with other words in a sentence.  Does it have the right fit?  Does it conjure up the experience that I want my reader to feel?

As I write and excavate through my vocabulary, I incessantly keep my reader on the forefront of my mind.  I want their worlds to be shaken by my writing.  I want them to be affected by each word that I fervidly hand pick.

A word is dead when it’s been said, some say.  I say it just begins to live that day.

                                                                                                                        -Emily Dickinson