Words and beginnings

Words. They keep the world going round. Society couldn’t function in its current form without the tricky little buggers. A man who is good with words seems to have it all his own way sometimes. Make no mistake - for all their potential for treachery, words are important.

I’m always impressed whenever I read anything that’s cleverly written. All those letters lined up in neat little rows and my, if they don’t fit together so damn well. An excess of words to choose from and it feels like the author has picked just the right ones. They belong together. The sentence clicks and it swings, man. My brain feels like its fizzing.

So I love to read well written stuff. But deep down I want to be on the other side. I want to be able to drop the Mentos in through the reader’s eyes and shake it with the Coke in their brain. I want to be able to take any topic and make it sound interesting enough to make the reader do something. I want to cause some of those emotion-type things that we humans are seemingly so in to. Hell, I’d settle for being entertaining.

But words are hard to work with. They don’t want to do what you so desperately want them to. I read what I’ve written and it sounds lame in my head. It’s off-putting. It lacks that polish and flair that makes those great articles really excite me. I lose my enthusiasm.

Well I guess it’s like anything. People aren’t just naturally great at stuff. Popular pseudo-science tells us that to become an expert, you need to do something 10,000 times, or for 10,000 hours. I can’t remember which. Regardless, what that means is the only thing I can be considered expert at is breathing – and even then I sometimes choke on my own spit.

What I’m getting at though is that practice is required to improve in anything. I want to get better at using the written word. It ain’t all that hard to see what I need to do. So here’s me taking steps. For this year, I aim to write at least one thing a week. A thing of my choosing, whatever takes my fancy. By the end there should be 52 assemblies of words to show for my efforts.

Ideally there will also be signs of improvement. Maybe I can one day be on the other side. Maybe I can make someone’s brain fizz.