The Power of Words
Published 5 November 2011
When I first began Desolate Beauty, my first novel, I was seventeen and excited by the challenge of writing a whole book from start to finish. I had no idea how to do it. I didn't think for a moment it would take me somewhere. But now, looking back, it was the first step in what continues to be fun and exciting journey.
While studying English and literature I often asked myself what was the real, practical point of it all. I love literature and I love writing even more, but can it make a difference? Teachers inspire lives. Doctor save lives. Preachers change lives. But what power is there in words?
I believe stories have a unique ability to comfort, to inspire, and to educate, in a way that nothing else can. But I also believe that they communicate things that would otherwise remain silent. They tell us we are not alone, that someone else has survived what we are going through and that this is how they did it. We learn from the heroes, and secretly hope that we too have something of the heroic in us. The stories we love most, the characters we most adore, are so loved because we recognise something in them that we hope is in ourselves.
Stories are all around us in the form of literature, movies and in the people we meet, and all of them let us escape reality for a moment, while giving us the strength to confront it. They remind us to experience life to the full, to every now and then feel the full range of emotions, from passion to fear, from anger to contentment. They tell us that we too have a story, the one thing that cannot be taken from us, and that it is that story that gives us a sense of belonging, that gives us purpose, that gives us meaning.
As part of this new website, I'll be continuing to explore that idea as well as many others surrounding how we can become the hero in our own life. Art in all its forms is about finding our own voice, our own way of expressing ourselves in a way that will make a lasting impression. I believe there is something in all of us, a desire to find what it is that gives us the most joy, that sparks the most passion, and to use that to somehow make a difference.