By HD Silversmith on Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Natalie Goldberg)
Preface
I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories -- of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. (xii)
Story-telling. It's pretty much a bottom-line, ingrained human endeavor, American or otherwise.
Even when we write nonfiction (as I do), we're still telling stories. About other stories. Intepreting data, finding and constructing meanings, identifying what's important (to us, to others) and what's not.
Writers call worlds into being.
There's a reason the Old Testament begins (in some translations) In the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God.
Writers are little gods, and the writers who set down the oral narratives that became the canonical books of the Old Testament knew this. Their views of storytellers and the roles that they played in society shaped the ways in which they communicated their cultures' ideas of deity and power.
There is nothing more powerful than language.
Fiat verbum. Fiat lux.
