Why I Don’t Play Wordle
I have always been a writer, though I use the term “writer” broadly. If I had to spin a wheel to choose any random moments from when I first started school as a wee nerd girl in the middle of nowhere in Australia till now, writing is the constant. My foundation and my sky, while everything else moves through the space between like a breeze, transient and impermanent.
I’ve used words for many things because in my mind, if I’m not doing that, I’m not giving them what they deserve. Bad poetry, years and years of journaling, articles, scripts, speeches, skits, little screenplays, essays , tweets— I love tweets because it’s restrictive. There are parameters. How much beautiful or stupid or silly can I fit in those little spaces? What words need to go, what can I add, what can I substitute to get under the character limit? I love these playgrounds.
My favorite phase was when I found as many poem structures as I could and forced myself to write something in each form. I should do that again.
Then I was lucky enough to have words become my job — well, a few jobs, really. Journalism, broadcast, speeches, corporate communications, PR, some UX writing for funsies, those little descriptions for TV shows you see on digital TV guides. One time my words were translated to Spanish and screamed to thousands of people in an arena in Barcelona. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve written for.
And I’ve loved it all. It’s like training to be a certain kind of warrior. It’s failing and failing and hammering and chipping away and fine-tuning and adjusting and failing and failing and failing until finally, one day very suddenly, it becomes easier. It’s clockwork. Then go try something else.
That’s one of the best things about words — no-one can wield them “perfectly,” ever, because there’s no such thing as one perfect. There are millions of perfects. Shakespeare has been perfect. Toni Morrison has been perfect. David Sedaris has been perfect. Billy Collins is perfect like 95% of the time, because he gets it. But none of them are always perfect, because it’s impossible.
Sometimes it’s one word, you know? The difference it can make. They way a sentence can sing in your head as your eyes move across a page or a screen, the rhythm of sentences, the breathing at line breaks. Every character is precious because any moment could be the moment you lose someone, and losing someone is easier than ever. I often joke with people that one day we’ll be using purely emojis and GIFs to communicate, like modern-day hieroglyphics, because people just can’t be bothered with words — only I’m not fucking joking.
The way I feel about words is how one can feel about drugs. I chase perfect sentences like they’re my next hit. I just want that feeling. The singing of the sentence. How the letters cascade forward, the shape of them, where on the page the sentence stops, how the entire phrase looks in regard to where it is on a page or a screen.
This is how I feel about words.
And you want me —
A PERSON WHO THINKS OF WORDS LIKE THIS —
to think of FIVE-LETTER WORDS
like I can pull them from a CATALOGUE in my HEAD —
during my leisure time, no less,
to guess the solution every damn day
with a limited amount of tries
like it’s RELAXING?!
no ty.
like, i’m happy for you, but
fuck worldle.
