My world of words

There are two main reasons why I write. One is to tell a story, or give my story at least on here. The other is for my love for the written word.

Firstly there is the collective of words. How the words come together to create an image or a phrase that rolls off your tongue and off the page, as your eyes roll along with them as you read. They enter your mind. They paint and create a pattern on the page in all their forms. Then there is quite simply just the word itself. I like how they look as a collective of letters on the page staring back at you.

I remember I started writing in a more creative and serious manner when I was twenty-seven years old, putting down some ideas for a story I had created in my head. I remember that year of my life well because it was when I conciously realised I wanted to put pen to paper (to coin a phrase). Those ideas ended up being a manuscript for a book about a year later; I will never forget the day I started writing it. Yet it wasn't then that I fell in love with words. It was right from the day I learned to read and write. From the first year of school, learning the alphabet and writing down letters.

I can still recall a lined page in a notebook from when I was around four. I had learned the letters and I knew how to put them down on the page. My mind has permanently scanned the image of that page, my best attempt at writing all neat and tidy and all the same sized letters, it looked something like this:

llldllsaghjkihffrsdaexzvkuottyrfjklasdmnbfre

Now that might look like I'm writing under the influence of alcohol to you, or that I just randomly hit a load of keys on the keyboard writing 'gobbledegook'. But oh no, not to Andrew the four year old. I could write and I wanted to show it! Allbeit, I still knew nothing about how the letters made real words and that there were gaps between the letters, and how vowels and consonents worked, but I didn't care. I was writing. I was in my own private novice world of kid literature. Nobody could tell me different, not even my dad who tried to show me some real words, writing them on the page under the one long scrawl of letters I had done:

car     fire engine     dog     cat     Andrew

He wrote them out just like that, with gaps inbetween so I could copy them and write underneath. But no, I liked the nonsense I was writing, and so I continued underneath my dad's guiding print as if I was constructing a wordsearch.

hfjkliuyghsdrtyioppmbvcxfsaqikopdcba.....

I really wish I still had that page from all those years ago, I would have scanned it and put it in this blog entry. I was so proud. So really you see, subconciously I knew I wanted to write from four years old, not twenty-seven.

I just love how words jump up at you as you read them making you want to say them, pronouncing them under your breath. In foreign languages I like how they are pronounced. When I was learning Italian for example, I just loved to see the word stronzo written down. I loved how it jumps up at you and makes you want to say it out loud. The only thing is it means arsehole or shit, so not something you should really go around saying , or at least select your moments before doing so. Another Italian word is bombolone - doughnut. Again how it is pronounced, the 'b' letters popping out from your lips, the roundness your mouth makes as you say the 'o's, imitating its physical circle form, and of course how it appears written on the page. The same goes for words in Spanish like zapatillas (slippers) and gazpacho (a kind of Spanish iced tomato soup). I like to read them, I love to say them.

Strangely, I rightly hate blasphemous words, in any language. Pardon me for writing them here but so that you can see what I mean - words like Porco Dio (pig God). Those two words just grate on me, they are bad words, they look bad and above all even sound bad in a foreign language. I tell Italian friends off if they use words like that.

I wrote in my entry Happy Blogging Birthday to me (22/09/09) how I can quite happily get lost in words. I stand by those words I wrote. I have a Wikipedia syndrome with a dictionary - I look up one word, then I see another, then another, and then think of another word associated with it, and so on and so forth.

So incase you don't see what my mind does, just try to remember its my world, as they are my words I choose to put down on a blank page like I did as a four year old. At least I now have an excuse for writing any crap.