For the Love…
I am late with this post, planned for St Valentine’s Day, of course. Not that we celebrate this date in our household, having a greater occasion to commemorate later this month.
Whether you’ve had someone to send a loving card to, or whether you have received love tokens, love is the key to an author’s life. Think about it:
- we must love writing to continue; without a love of writing as a repetitive activity, we are lost
- we must know we are loved to be able to convey emotion in our work; without emotive similes and metaphors, vocabulary and comment, we will write wooden words that will not speak
- the great classics all contained elements of family and romantic love; for many, it was the pivot of the plot
- even tragedies and thrillers are about an absence of love
Into Love?
The Later Writer will usually have great experience of love, past and present, won and lost, enjoyed and mourned… the opposite of having known love is a dryness I am glad I do not know.
I do recall the end of a long marriage, wrapped up in divorce. Four were involved, the couple and their two grown offspring. Somehow they all survived and it seems a thread of love still persists, a type of respect mixed with regret.
I have known the loss of apparent love, and of loved ones. I’ve had to dig deep emotionally to get out of my bedroom each day and turn up at my office desk in the adjoining room. There were piles of books to catalogue, read and review. I love books; they kept me going.
The Love of Words…
I cannot pretend to have ever swallowed a dictionary, but I do adore words. Finding the right one often eludes me, for memory is not improving with age.
I enjoy exercising my (MS) brain, dredging for those missing words, almost as much as spending time with my family. They are my love source; Mums don’t need their children less as they age. Au contraire. More time please.
The odd foreign phrase adds a certain gravitas, n’est ce pas?
Vive l’amour!
