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By McKayla Freeman
12
"Writers bury meanings like pirates bury treasure..."
It’s hard to put in words exactly how I feel sometimes. Sometimes, it’s like all the words are right there in my head; except they’re not words; they’re images and colors and light. It’s not usually that I don’t have enough words to create whatever it is that I need to create; it’s that there are far too many words for me to possibly choose just a few. They circle behind my eyes, just out of my reach, just beyond comprehension.
There was a day a long time ago when I could write anything and its meaning would be exactly what you read; exactly what you saw there on the page, and I was okay with it. That day passed, and my life became more complicated—I became more complicated. Everything has meaning these days. I can see it in between the lines and curves on the page.
Writing isn’t so much creating art with words; it’s creating words with feelings. Writing is coming up with an idea that means so much to you that you can barely even express it and then covering it with a mess of letters and punctuation and plot and characters. Writers bury meanings like pirates bury treasure and it takes a true map reader to find the gold.
There are some emotions that can’t quite be expressed in the English language. It is an author’s job to find a way to convey these wordless enigmas.
these wordless enigmas. As a child I used to say that writers were like wizards—always doing the impossible. Every pencil was a magic wand, laden with responsibility and significance. Every sentence was an incantation, giving life to ideas that could change the world.
The first time I wrote a story, I fell in love with the idea of creating another world. I wrote for days on end, concluding the narrative after almost a year of writing non-stop. I imagined a brave eight-year-old, abandoned by her parents, adopted by a rich millionaire. Surrounded by conspiracy theories and a strange interest from her adopted father in her somehow-inherited spying abilities, she began to suspect something was wrong.