The Art and Craft of Writing … with WORDS
Welcome!
Greetings, everyone -
Welcome!
And what a wonderful word ‘welcome’ is.
This month I’ll be exploring ‘words’ - before words become language; before words become parts of speech.
As always, you’ll have the chance to improve your writing skills by exploring ‘words’, by exploring the exercises based on them, and by sharing your insights along the way.
Put your talents to composing an entry to this month’s competition based on the illustration by Carol Michelon which appears in the ‘Words’ section of Master the Art and Craft of Writing, due out in 2023.
You’ll find the details of the specific task below.
But first … What is a word? What kinds of words are there? And what’s the difference between a living word and an empty shell?
What is a word?
When I asked my friend and colleague, geometer Adam Tetlow, what a word was for him, he said,
‘a container of energy – a gesture that contains an archetype, as all gesture must, otherwise it can’t be a gesture.’
Author Max Picard links words to goodness.
‘In the word that was related to the greatest silence was the greatest goodness. Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive. Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence. … Language is surrounded by the dark rim of melancholy, no longer by the rim of silence.’
For Owen Barfield, the ‘first and last Inkling’, words were ‘symbols of consciousness’.
For me, living words are forms with fiery boundaries – they are outcries and insights – they are charms – they are spells. They inhabit the liminal space between perception and pervasion. Emanations of acts of inspiration, they are the means by which the love of ideas comes forth to meet the world, to dance and shine in it.
They are the kinds of words that you must be as good as if you are to be as good as your word, or if you are to give your word to someone, and mean to keep it. They are words we can fall in love with.
The Arabic word for marble (‘marmar’) is one of my favourites; the English words, ‘incandescence’ and ‘iridescence’ are two more. And then there’s that line of words which evoke different aspects of fire – its furious heat; its glittering spark: the soft ‘feu’ (French), leading to ‘fear’ and ‘fire’, then the harder ‘fuoco’ (Italian) [or ‘foco’ if you’re into Operatic Italian, as I am], and the peak of intensity of the Spanish ‘fuego’.
This month’s competition
For this month’s competition, choose a living word and start and end a piece of writing with it. Your piece of writing must be no longer than 73 words in total. It must link to and be inspired in some way by Carol’s illustration and show off your ability to reference, or feature words in an inspirational way.
Meanwhile, you can hear more about what inspired carol to come up with her illustration for words in this short YouTube video.
Part of The Unknown Storyteller project, focusing on the art and craft of how to tell a story, Master the Art and Craft of Writing is the counterpart to Story and Structure: A complete guide. The book explains how to structure the story you want to tell in the first place. It will help you shape great stories to tell. It’s due out later this year, in the second half of 2022.
Remember - posts are open to comments – you can post questions, share ideas and discuss approaches to the theme and learn from others. I’d love to hear from you – and find out what role words play in your life.
All the best -
Leon
Full rules can be found here.
Deadline: Midnight on Sunday 24th April 2022 BST
Upload your submissions here and share them on social media with the hashtags #unknownstoryteller #carolmichelon #leonconrad #artandcraftofwriting
PS Adam Tetlow has a brilliant live on-line course in harmonic geometry starting in mid-April, based on his recent book The Diagram guaranteed to make you think more harmoniously.