Q: What is a writer without pen and paper? A: Lost!

Writing is for forgetful people who want to remember their thoughts....and I am a very forgetful person!:) It's such a comfort and a joy to be able to keep both thoughts and ideas that feel like they matter, both at that time and later on.

And then when I come back and rediscover what I caught and nailed to earth, something that would have been otherwise lost to me, and then to form it and even to piece together separate loose scraps of papered thought if they fit into a whole, and to make something new and better than the original sentence or paragraphs or even the few jotted words bound together by inspiration, whether they were profound or fragmented, and to feel the thrilling satisfaction of creation and then the shouting triumph of completion......oh, wonder of wonders!

It brings the bright hope of possibilities into the room and into your mind and gives you pride even in those small, unpresuming, scrawled folds of paper floating about the house, shoved in drawers and hiding or buried on surfaces high and low. Because while their time of origination may have forgotten itself, you at least know that these scattered pieces can never be useless to you, because they are still living embers of your thought, ready to bloom whenever you should choose to recall them. Any of these small pieces could be the beginning of a greater literary idea. If only to the writer. 

Writing is another way of being. You are placing and then forming your thoughts down where you can see them in front of you. Your ideas come from you, are made by you, and are a part of you; you are simply putting them in material, visual form, more apparent than the swimming and vaguely colored thoughts, and demanding more notice in their new state of existence. And also opening up whole new avenues (thoughtways) for you to explore. It's amazing!

The blank paper is an open window through which to see, and a pencil is a key to discovery. These are the only two tools necessary for this beautiful process, and the two tools which I am sometimes almost desperate for, lest I lose that fragile prize which I have suddenly, mentally stumbled upon.

The more that I express myself on paper, the more I understand how to begin doing so. I'm learning how to communicate through this form of practice.

Does this make any sense to you? There's nothing strange or mystical about it: I'm simply trying to describe the creative process in my own stumbling words. We are made in God's own image, therefore we create. Or at any rate, we re-express His own creation. He has given us being....life and breath and a world to live in, all of it come into existence by His spoken word. Oh, the power of words, and most of all, the power of Him! Words should always be a gift in the best sense of the term.