Words Can Change the World, I Think

Words can change the world . . . or a small piece of it.

Or so I believe.

However, in a writer’s discussion not long ago, someone asked: what are some examples as proof of that?

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Writing is so often meant to carry our thoughts and words far beyond us, to places where we won’t always see their effect.

Well, here’s something. A little fable. Not proof of anything, since it’s fictional.

It’s a link to a beautiful 5-minute film. I ran across it on a Milwaukee marketing firm’s blog, so I’ll send it to you via their page. Check it out (and thanks, Data Dog, for helping us discover this.)

Click here to watch:
Historia de un letrero (A short original film, with subtitles)
written & directed by Alonso Alvarez Barreda

Take a few moment to check it out.

And let’s keep thinking about that question.
As writers, can we make a real difference in the world with our words?

How? (And if we do . . . will we know?)

A Thanksgiving Thought: Why Do We Write?

We’re approaching The Curve.

That’s how I think of the end of the calendar year (just a few weeks away!). Is New Year’s Eve really the start of something as new as a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes?

In my mind, it’s a continuation. We round the curve and see a new landscape. But it’s one that’s been there all along; it wasn’t created in the moment of the ringing of the New Year’s bells.

To make a successful turn means . . . braking a bit, so you can see the terrain and be ready for what’s around the bend. But maintaining good forward momentum.

(Some curves are nicely banked as we speed through them. Others have surprises!)

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. They seldom succeed, perhaps because they are based on a false sense of newness. I like continuation. (Which includes constant but small, sustainable change.)

And as a Midwesterner, late November and the spirit of Thanksgiving really kicks off my desire to look at my life and resolutions. Why wait till January 1? Now’s the time to build up the right momentum to see you smoothly around The Curve.

(Do I have enough wood chopped and stacked to see me through? Am I the cricket, fiddling and hopeful as the first snows fall, or the ant filling the storehouse with abundance?)

I took a minute to look back at the purpose behind this blog, launched on February 13, to expand on my mission as the series editor of The New Writer’s Handbook to help more writers build a successful writing career, step by step. At the core is my belief: if we write well, we can make a real difference.

I closed that first post with a message from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Words are also actions, as actions are a kind of words.”

Preparing to round the corner, here are more thoughts on that basic issue: why do we write?

“One can never pay in gratitude: one can only pay ‘in kind’ somewhere else in life.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“I feel we are all islands – in a common sea.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.”
– Sydney Smith (English essayist and clergyman, 1771-1845)

“An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding. And it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.”
- Robert Lewis Stevenson

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
– Ray Bradbury

Let me close by sharing wonderful words from a colleague, Bruce Holland Rogers, who wrote a great essay, “On Being a Minor Writer,” found in part in The New Writer’s Handbook 2007 and also available for 49 cents here from Amazon Shorts. (I also highly recommend his book, Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer.)

We are writers, not profit centers. We live in the world of numbers, but we can choose to remember that the world of numbers is all made up. It’s one way of seeing things, but not the only way.  . . . We can choose where our focus is. Jesus said, “Be in the world, but be not of it.” Buddhism instructs us to be awake, but to live without attachment. Other great religions remind us of this same thing. We must do our business in the marketplace, but not confuse the marketplace with the Supreme, with our ultimate purpose.

Measurement, comparing one degree of success with another, keeps us apart.  . . . But we’re not so different, whether we’ve made the bestseller list or are still seeking our first sale. We’re all of us minor writers. Our measurements don’t matter nearly as much as our immeasurable contributions. Measuring keeps us from living in full communion with one another and the world.

Preoccupation with measuring, with seeing how your career stacks up, steals time from making your contribution. Making your contribution, your deepest offering to readers, means that you don’t try to impress, but only to reveal the impressive thing beneath your work: the language, the subject matter, or whatever it is that you love. Love something, and then get out of the way so that from the side you can point to what you love. That’s how you contribute.

What will you contribute in the coming year? What will be your deepest offering to readers?

That’s my Thanksgiving thought . . . thanks to all those writers sharing their words with the world.

Spirituality and Writing

As we wallow through the political conventions (Republican this week, Democratic last week), I find myself thinking about our role as writers, and to what extent we practice spirituality in our craft.

I can’t define spirituality for you (maybe not even for myself). It has something to do with a deep connectedness, compassion for others, a generous spirit, a search for meaning, a willingness to serve as well as lead.

Does our writing reflect that?

Do we try to have a positive influence on our community? Whether we might vote for Obama or McCain, do we gather in the shade and water the roots of the Common Good, a venerable old tree that’s been buffeted and bashed like a live oak in New Orleans?

I might want to encourage truth, as in “telling truth to power.” But truth is hard to find, let alone tell. And too often, it’s told to those in power, by those out of power . . . in a woefully slanted fashion, just to grab some power for ourselves.

Better, as writers, to help to keep channels of communication open. To observe and contribute ideas. To look for ways to connect, not divide.

As a student of the literary genre of fantasy, watching the conventions, I feel that political rhetoric tends more to that tradition than to nonfiction. It’s more often wishful thinking and fanciful construct than truth.

And in many ways, truth (even Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”) is over-rated in talking about the common good.

More important? The aspects of spirituality I mentioned: compassion, generosity, connectedness, meaning, service.

Dorothy Day, Catholic activist for the poor and working classes, said:

I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy. . . .

She also said: “We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.“

From Gandhi:

Be the change you want to see in the world.

For writers, perhaps that means crafting words that bring us closer together, to nod and smile, to hold hands and breathe the same air, and to share a delight in the wonder of the world with everyone.

Walt Whitman: Twirl of My Tongue

What is the calling of a great writer?

To write. To celebrate. To see how everything is connected and equal. To share the smallest of epiphanies, and to show how it is the same as the largeness of the universe. “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” said Walt Whitman.

According to Walt Whitman, in his excited, extravagant, effusive, ecstatic rant on great poetry and bold expression in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass:

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
and with the young, and with the mothers or families,
read these leaves in the open air every season
of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told in school or church
or in any book,
and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
and your very flesh shall be a great poem . . . .
The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work.
He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed
and manured . . .
He shall go directly to the creation.

The ground is already ready for the writer, ploughed and manured. Go directly to the process of creativity. Again, from Whitman (in Song of Myself):

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds
and volumes of worlds.

With a twirl of the tongue . . . or flourish of the pen . . . or clickety-clack of the keyboard.

Go forth and encompass worlds. Today.