I remember when I was very young, taking a ream of paper and some
magic markers into my den and devising stories. I would cover pages and pages
of white paper with scribbles of color that formed princesses, palaces, horses,
and wicked step-mothers. Then, quite carefully, using a building block as a
ruler for straight lines, I would write the words. They were simple words,
written in a child’s thick, uneven scrawl, but they captured my perspective of
the world at the time. And today, when I look back at the stories that my
parents saved, for a moment I am only six years old again, and the world looks
just as it used to. I do not know for certain today why I felt compelled to
write these stories, but it was probably due in part to the books my mother
read me. Almost every night of my childhood I drifted to sleep with her
soothing southern accent feeding my dreams with stories. To this day, after
putting down a
particularly satisfying book, a part of me longs to take a stack
of paper and a pencil and write my own.
There is a room in my house that is
full of books—the entire span of one wall is covered in shelves of literature
on every subject imaginable. Old torn volumes with coffee-stained pages, and
newly bound novels that still smell freshly of the bookstore and crack their
spines when opened—all sit on the shelves bursting with words and ideas,
waiting to be discovered. Each is a unique view into the world of the writer,
and within its pages I discover perspectives I had never though about before.
Two writers might write about the exact same thing, and leave me feeling two
very different ways. To me, that is the beauty of literature—of words in
general. They can be manipulated and strung together just so, such that for a
split second everything looks exactly how the author saw it. And when authors
are dead, their worlds are preserved forever in the pages of books, so that
long after their existence others can still experience life through their eyes.
That is what I find myself longing to do after putting down a book—I want to
write a story so that people can know how I felt and saw things, and maybe be
better for it. Sometimes it is almost painful, because I know that I have not
gained enough life experience yet—anything I wrote would not speak fully of who
I am, for even I have not discovered that yet. But my memories are preserved in
little paragraphs and sentences I come up with now and then. They are sketches
of my world, so that one day I can pull them all together, weaving them with
words into my own story.
Literature fascinates me—no two writers ever see the world in the
same way. To read a book is to understand someone else’s soul, and to expand my
own. Only recently, upon finishing a book, I placed it down and thought for a
while, knowing that what I had just read had somehow changed my world in
intangible ways. I felt a surge of inspiration, to collect all my experiences
and fold them together neatly between pages for someone else to discover. And I
know that nothing would be more satisfying then to open a brand new book, hear
the crack of the spine, smell the freshness of the pages, and see my own soul
captured forever in dark black ink.
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