What Words Can Do: A Writer’s ABCs

Words can be beautiful but also gut-wrenching. Letters strung together in the right order can acknowledge, boost and clarify. They can discern, educate and forgive. They galvanize and highlight. They inspire us and allow us to journey, keep and love; manifest, nurture and opine. They can promote, question and remember. Support, teach and unite. They voice. They witness. They can x-ray; they can yearn and they encourage us to zig and to zag.

They are flexible, but muscular.

Because I admire these tools of my trade, I spent this month hunting for powerful examples of what words can do for us. From A to Z.

To honor them and shine a light on how hard they work.

Acknowledge  

You can’t heal what you don’t feel.

John Bradshaw

Boost

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Clarify

Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being.

Jane Hirshfield

Discern

Obscurity is dispelled by augmenting the light of discernment, not by attacking the darkness.

Socrates

Educate

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Maimonides

Forgive

… how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

bell hooks

Galvanize

Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.

Michael Jordan

Highlight

The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.

Henry Green

Inspire

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Gandi

Journey

There are many paths but only one journey.

Naomi Judd

Keep

Keep a diary and someday it'll keep you.

Mae West

Love

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Lao Tzu
 

Manifest

What you think you become. What you feel you attract. What you imagine you create.

Buddha

Nurture

Find out what your gift is and nurture it.

Katy Perry

Opine

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Promote

Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.

John Lennon

Question

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

Remember

Remember that you own what happened to you.

Anne Lamott

Support

No one has ever become poor by giving.

Anne Frank

Teach

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

C. S. Lewis

Unite

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack. 

Rudyard Kipling

Voice

Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind - even if your voice shakes.

Maggie Kuhn

Witness

So what can we really do for each other except--just love each other and be each other's witness?
James Baldwin

Xray

… music is like an X-ray of your soul - it shows what is there, and what isn't.

Isaac Stern

Yearn

… part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you…

W.S. Merwin

Zig Zag

Zig when the world expects you to zag.

James Patterson

 Photo from Unsplash

Upcoming Events

Printer’s Row Lit Fest. Find me at the Chicago Writer’s Association booth on Sunday, September 11, 11 am - 2 pm.

“That Which We Call a Rose.” StoryStudio Chicago Writers Festival. Sunday, October 2, 11:30 am.

“The Art of Memoir” Daylong workshop on the Ragdale campus sponsored by Story Jam. In Person. Tuesday, October 18. 10 am - 4 pm.