Being someone who arranges words seems like a silly profession.
But that is what writing is, isn’t it?
You start with reading – seeing how someone else had done it.
Then you sit down with a blank page – and practice doing it yourself.
They force you to do it in school.
And then somewhere along the way the words and the language become what you love.
It becomes the life you want, and the life you need.
When I think about my child-self, my little girl memories, all that little girl wanted to be was a storyteller, a poet, a person who gathers and arranges words like some people gather and arrange flowers. Words are the breakdown through which I see all of life, instead of molecules or notes or chords or colors. Words in even black and white snakes, back and forth across the page, the portals through which a little girl found a big world, and through which, now, a grown-up girl is trying to pass.
–Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines
