When I was a new writer, I enjoyed stringing together beautiful words.

To this day, I’ll choose a word as much as, if not more, for its sound within the sentence as for its meaning.

But.

But it took me a little bit of writing publicly to fully understand that writing words is not enough—no matter how beautiful or poetic or powerful the prose, writing words is not enough. Because words must have meaning.

It’s when words convey a simple, universally felt truth and are beautiful that good writing is made.

Great writing, though I won’t pretend to completely know it, can only exist when we are not scribbling words just to scribble.

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

~F. Scott Fitzgerald

It took me longer than I’d care to admit to fully comprehend that sentence above.

And there are times when I write just because I feel like it.

The clickity-clack, clickity-clack on black-and-white letters soothes my tired spirit, uplifts my fragile human heart and makes me feel impassioned, empowered and whole when I feel none of these things until the words have crossed my heart and lips through my fingertips.

But.

But for words to be shared with the intention of reaching the hearts and minds of others, they must have meaning.

Words that are beautiful, powerful, fill-in-the-blank sounding and that resonate emotionally become worth sharing when they also offer something worth hearing—something true—this is the recipe for great writing.

Or, at least, this is the something that I have to say today.

Photo: Flickr/Writing.

The post Words Must Have Meaning. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

Her fragile heart leaked into her muscle fibers.

She felt the bones in her jaw store her collected, unsaid words.

The raw space in the hollow of her clavicles housed disappointment she didn’t want to acknowledge, and, sometimes, she felt the reverberating of words that she tried to stuff and cram back down long after they had exploded onto the pages of her life.

She generally wore her exposed and beating red heart outside her body, but, often, it was too tender, so she caged it up for awhile behind careful guardedness and playful laughter.

The narrow edge of her right hand glides along the thin, lined notebook.

She pores herself into her written words because, though completely exposed, she feels the cushion of pen and ink and air; where the harshness of reality slips loosely between punched holes at the notebook’s ringed binding; puddling onto the nicked, hardwood table that grazes her breasts as she hunches over her work.

And somewhere in her, an aching loneliness is quenched and soothed by this outpouring of letters and punctuation.

She pauses, sips coffee and returns to the unfair speed of her fertile mind and pumping, fragile heart, and she regains strength from the fortifying and comforting elixir of many writers before her—her coffee mug reads “Rise and Shine”—and, more, from the releasing of the space between her clavicles.

Because as she oozes out and onto the neatly lined page, she feels a shift in the muscles of her throat. She notices, too, a loosening in her head that’s not from caffeine.

She feels free. 

Long ago she heard that the truth shall set her free and, while she finds this to not always be the case, she knows devotedly that owning and baring her honest human heart—however tender and fragile it may be—is the sole path to both joy and ease.

More, she knows that she writes because she must, to breathe.

Photo: Author’s own; Courtney Emery/Flickr.

The post Her Words Are Her Breath. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.