For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write novels. In one of my earliest journals, there’s a little note scribbled messily on an index card and taped to the front page. In the delightfully messy handwriting of an eight-year-old, it says, “I want to make music with my words.”
My goal hasn’t changed much. To me, writing is magic. We can communicate so much through writing. We can capture human emotions and share them across time and space. We share things about ourselves we never dare to speak aloud. Sometimes we even share things we never dared admit to ourselves.
“No matter what people tell you,” says Professor Keating in Dead Poet’s Society, “Words and ideas can change the world.” The best writing does change the world. Stories inspire people. They raise us up, remind us of who we are, who we are not, and who we want to be. Even film—which is arguably one of the most popular and widespread forms of storytelling in today’s culture—can be a powerful testament to the importance of art. At the end of Greta Gerwig’s new adaption of Little Women, the heroine, Jo March, holds a published copy of her own novel for the first time. I think about that moment in my own life a lot—what will it feel like, holding a hardcover book in my hands that I wrote? That is released in the world? That other people can read and resonate with?
I have stories in my imagination, but they don’t feel like my own. I am only an observer, writing what I see. I don’t own them; they come to me like a dream and they haven’t left. They feel like a book I read a long time ago, like a story that I’ve already read. My own personal, secret belief is that all stories exist perfectly in another higher dimension of thought, and only the artist can occasionally glimpse them. It’s like God assigns writers the books they’re meant to write.
I’ve always felt, deep down, that my purpose is to put these on paper and share them with the world. I genuinely feel called to write these books, and like Jo March, I can’t wait for the moment when I hold a copy of my own book in my hands. I want to change the world with my writing. It’s a lofty goal, I know, and maybe my books don’t have to change every part of the world, but they will at least change one person’s world. Maybe, in the end, that would be enough.
<3 Olivia Grace
