Writing and the word

Writing is an experiment in improvisation. It is an artistic exercise that seeks to establish a truth based on written characters. This truth can be existential or profound, but most of the time it is a truth that seeks to inform or to entertain. Sometimes, the truth is not what is written but what it pretends to portray as truth.

Fiction is a shell game, a way to hoodwink the reader into believing a truth that doesn’t exist, except in the mind of the writer. And once this truth leaves the mind of the writer, it stops being his. It then belongs to the reader.

But fiction writing needs more than just an avid imagination. It needs the tools to tell a story, and tell it well. So the writer seeks words, much like the painter seeks brushes and colors, to fix his vision on paper. In this sense, the dictionary is a writer’s best friend.

Used to be, a dictionary was always at my bedside. I would wake up and read words and their meaning, in an exhaustive exercise to know and master all the elements needed for writing. Now, in the technology age, dictionaries are not bound mountains of papers, but are contained in websites and programs that help expand one’s knowledge of the written word, enabling us to perform with respect and reverence the art of fiction writing.

Entertainers, newscasters, they all use words found in the dictionary, but only a writer lets the words use him or her in the process of creation.