Words

Words

Recently I had a chance to read something I wrote aloud.  Now, this wasn’t something I had written for someone else in particular, or for an audience that I had in mind.  This wasn’t a lesson or a poem or song lyrics or a play or anything like that.  It was a story I wrote for myself.  And because these words are in my head, I don’t need to read them aloud often to myself.  At best, I just whisper the words under my breath.  Reading aloud is a totally different story altogether.  I put could put in the tone that I wanted, with the inflections that I wanted for the first time.

When I was a young boy I was taught that reading aloud was a wonderful thing.  Through the words I was hearing, I was transported across worlds and times.  I became entranced with the stories read to me late at night.  And because this was before bedtime, I would often delve into these worlds that I had been told in my dreams.  My dreams became alive with heroics and quests and worlds and all sorts of beautiful things.

That’s the things about dreams, I don’t remember them like I want to all the time.  Maybe that’s why I reread books, to recapture the moments that made me first fall in love with them.  It is in rereading these stories that I became more entranced by them.  I fell more in love with the stories.  I wanted to live them out, to become the heroes I was slowly idealizing.

And bit by bit I changed.  Over the years I began to change how I retold the stories.  It would be cool if this person did this or that over what they actually did.  What would happen to the characters after the story?  Thus began my dive into fan stories and fan theories and an unhealthy obsession.  That unhealthy obsession led me to creating my own stories, of my own characters.

Now I write my own stories, as it is my passion.  So when I read a bit of my work aloud, that same magic happened when I was a boy.  The words became more than just the things I put on a page.  They became alive.  They were alive.  I could feel my heart racing and my throat tighten.

I call it the Writer’s High.  When I get finished with a piece of work my heart pumps and my limbs go numb with exertion.  I sit back, staring at the screen.  There’s satisfaction in completing something.  It’s something akin to that that happened then.  A level of wonderment and excitement and child-like amazement came together all at once.

It was a moment to live for.  It was a moment to hunt for, for the magic that makes words come alive.