Monday, February 15, 2021
The Power of Words
When Not To Do Your Best
I know, strange heading - right? Essentially every writer wants to write to their full potential. But words are powerful, and sometimes writing to the best of your ability can be very dangerous. This is a topic I have spent much time dwelling on and have even learned more about from personal experience.
To put it simply, words are very powerful. But let me elaborate. There are renowned authors today who are very talented at what they do. But I also believe that few of them have taken the time to honestly evaluate just how good they really are. You see, if words are arranged in the proper order and the proper time, they can conjure up emotions, ideas, and pictures stronger than reality.
The point that I am trying to get across is best summed up in a short experience that I had not very long ago. I had purchased a book online, I didn't know the author's work but the book was on clearance and I viewed it as an opportunity to familiarize myself with another author and, if I didn't like the book, I wouldn't have wasted a lot of money on it. As I began to read this book, emotions were stirred within me that I had never felt before in my life. I felt the pain of the character like I had never experienced. I felt like I was dying inside, I was in mental, emotional, and even physical agony because of how connected the writer was making me feel with the character.
It is important that you can relate and gravitate to a character in a novel, but with this situation, the writer had gone too far. After much serious contemplation I would come to realize that the book was the writer to her full potential. And to her full potential meant writing a book that would plague me with feelings that I hadn't felt since the death of someone very close to me. Some might argue that this was merely a really good writer and the book was too deep for me to read, but that wasn't it.
As writers, we are sometimes so eager to soar to our full potential that we forget to take a step back, put on an objective point of view, and really examine our work. Words our powerful, like sticks of dynamite...they were not meant to be carelessly toyed with. Sometimes our full potential can be toxic to others. When we are at our best as writers, we could be constructing a manuscript that is far too heady to do anyone any good.
That is why we need to know when we can write at our best and we have to set the bar lower than we know we are capable of. If you think this is showing weakness, it isn't. It is showing that you care about who reads your book. We are given talents, but that does not always mean that we can let them run free, because even good talents, if not held back, can unleash something very savage.
Sometimes our full potential can be dangerous, and that is when you need to know when not to do your best.
~Lydia R. Sherren
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