Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
–Rudyard Kipling
Writers love words, and the power they carry and amass when joined with other words. Part of writer’s job is not only to tell a story, but to also develop a way with words that allows you to convey your chosen story in a way that moves the reader.
But writers can never adore the words we write, the phrases and paragraphs we craft, to such a degree that we fail to look at what we writer critically and ask:
Has what I’ve written bolstered life?
Do my words inspire and affirm?
Do they tear down?
That the answers to these questions need always favor our readers and their situations is obvious. How to accomplish this is not always as clear as one might think.
Since characters form the heart and soul of any story, what an author thinks of her or his characters, how much she or he loves them and coveys that on the page is a great place to start.
How much do you, if you craft fiction, love your characters?
How much do their flaws endear them to you?
Do they repel you?
Do your characters even have flaws?
How big are your protagonist’s problematic character traits and do they play prominently into your story line?
The same can be asked of a painter concerning the images beckoning her or him to give them life on a canvas.
I was once taught that the three C’s of a story with which readers resonate are: character, conflict and core emotional need. And every good painting has a plot that lay embedded in the overall disposition or spirit of the painting.
A character whose life so touches readers that the readers are compelled to finish the story, if for no other reason than to know that this character will survive is a well-written book. Vibrant and vivid characters write the most entertaining and moving books by guiding the author’s hand, just as the most abundant and forceful images energize us to pick lift a brush and construct what our minds thought our hand and fingers incapable of painting. To gain this strength, the character must feel that she is accepted, love, not in spite of, but because of her or his flaws.
This acceptance is inherent on the writer or painter’s part when she or he surrenders to the call of the muse, the inner yearnings of a soul striving to assert its immortal presence upon the world and humans.
The first ears that the words of our characters touch, the eyes that perceive these images and visual ideas in their most nascent and raw forms, are that of the writer and painter who will construct and shape them. These artists’ hands will bring formlessness into being and provide them with a viable container rendering them comprehensible to the world.
In the best of all circumstances the forms we apply to our creations allows the work to evolve over time—that each new set of eyes observing and/or reading the images and words spawns a new concept or belief, faith and realization concerning that person, their identity, and the meaning of their life in the context of the lives of others.
Transposing the words and images that come to us in our stories and paintings—physically availing them for others to touch and experience deepens the observer’s consciousness of self and others.
This is one of the most vulnerable, and yet exciting, experiences in which anyone, artist or observer, can engage. The artist must be present to the work—with every word penned or typed, with every stroke of color made upon the canvas–if they are to summon and hold the awareness of the observer.
Yet this is the place where the artist dwells and thrives—this state of being, ebbing and flowing in a vicissitude of tides and showers.
Rudyard Kipling’s statement deposits us back to the importance of what we, as artists do–that of bringing words to the formless stories of our minds, or as painters, casting images that bespeak a thousand words upon canvas.
In either case, words are the intoxicant allowing us to imbibe meaning from these creations, and share our ideas with others, or rather acknowledge the affirmation and acceptance they have engendered in us as observers and readers.
Whatever the case we are purveyors of spirit.
As such we must tread softly, and with awareness.
Writers and artists we deal in a serious business. Our words, and the images that evoke more words than one can ever speak, carry the power to bestow life or cast death.
Our creations either resurrect or exile spirit and hope. The decision is ours.
The answer of what we shall do lies in our most vulnerable selves—what we see and encounter when transposing the musings of our psyche.