Mystery and Structure, Style and Attitude (Ch. 9)

"But if you make the right marks in the right order, you can change a reader's life. Change enough lives, you can change the world." --Philip Gerard, page 158 in Creative Nonfiction

I am a huge believer in the power of words to make change happen. That's what makes writing worthwhile, despite the difficulties of being a writer. "We're trying to express the world of the senses through little black marks, and it's damned hard to do" (page 157). It is very hard to express everything that we want to through words, but I love writing as a means of expression. I love the flexibility of words, all the ways we can arrange them, all the perspectives, all the possibilities. You can create any story, any place, any person you want with words. It's not easy, but I'll take that over tubes of oil paint any day. As I said in an earlier post, writers are usually considered the rebels of their time, seeing through the bullshit and lies that society tries to press onto the masses. Even if a work doesn't enact change during a writer's lifetime, anyone could be inspired by that same work at any point in time. Changing the way that just one person sees the world is good enough for me.