I hear it often from people: “You’re a writer, you’re good with words.”

What I’m reflecting on while in a space where I have the time to reflect is that maybe, some writers are those folks who are not by nature “good with words.” Words, we may have, yes! We love words, love to read, love books, love poetry, love language. But that doesn’t mean that words come easily. We may have to work for and with them, rearrange and revise, check meanings and spellings, consider etymology and new ways of using words.

It may be we wrestle with them and, like Jacob with the Angel, find the process causes injury as well as revelation.

Writing may be a cat that follows us home when we really have nothing to feed it and our apartment building doesn’t allow cats, but there it is: needy and appealing, sitting on our doorstep.

For many writers, words are hard. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “Oh to be silent! Oh, to be a painter!” Some writers might prefer to be making a non-wordy art. Less energy to expend on how to say.

I know I can speak for a few writers when I state that, at least sometimes, words can be easier to write than to speak. If I’m chatting to somebody about my family or the garden or my opinions about online learning management systems (LMSs), I don’t usually have trouble with words. Those concepts stay within the familiar and the easy-to-express, even among people I barely know. In such conversations, I can be lively, make jokes, have opinions, and tell stories. This is social speech of a casual sort, even when the subjects are often close to my heart (well, not LMSs…).

But many things that are either more philosophical or more deeply reflective, even intimate, evade me when I try to say them in conversation. Questions I have, I may fear to ask. Describing a feeling, sensation, or emergent idea can be so difficult I decide just to stay quiet, listen to what I can glean from others. If my fellow conversationalists are patient and sympathetic and stay with me through more abstract, emotional, or artistic/philosophical topics, I will still find myself losing the thread of my sentences and tapering off into gesture. Gesture covers (badly) what I can’t seem to put into words. Even though I am supposedly good with words.

Later, I may endeavor to express in writing what I wanted to say when I resorted to silence. Writing is not the heat of the moment–there can be revisions, honing of concepts, maybe some research to cover the various vague lacunae during which I’d previously resorted to shrugging. Shall we say: clarification of thought through better words in a better order.* I may never learn to be adept at succinct intellectual conversation, but I can eventually get to compression of language for effect in a written text.

That would be enough. Or maybe it’s as David Kirby writes in his poem “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”— “Writing isn’t hard./You just have to be patient. You just have to get/everything right.”

~

*Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s definition of poetry: best words in the best order.