Voices and Expressing Pain

In English class we're getting ready to read The Color Purple, which apparently has quite a bit of pain and suffering in it, so, to get us ready, our teacher had us write about painful experiences we had had and read them aloud to the class. When we finished with that, she gave us two prompts to write about in our journals: why is the voice in writing so important, and, if we finished with that, why do we write about pain? This is what I wrote:


A song cannot be sung without a voice, and words cannot be spoken. A world without voices would be silent and dismal, but the same power spreads to the second dimension, where words on paper are nothing without life in them.

With an obvious voice in a piece, the words can speak to the reader just as clearly as if the author was standing right there. The characters and events become alive, and one can lose him or herself inside of the story. An eighty-year-old can spell out the lines of a four-year-old girl, and a teenager can describe the thoughts of a middle aged parent. The sentences turn familiar and understandable, and everything becomes so incredibly real. An author can spell words in a way that invokes accent, and can distinguish between character styles just with a few mere changes in the way letters are formed and arranged. He or she who has the power to play so many different parts just with a pen is the real magician of this world. 


For pain (which I honestly don't write/think about a lot):

If thoughts and feelings about pain weren't shared, every single human would be ready to burst, burning with the endless and torturous memories of their experiences. But we write and talk, and we realize that we are not alone in anguish.



I like to write.

Procrastination

Hmmm, let's see if she can go an entire month without posting anything! She used to post every day, didn't she?!