Creative Juices for Writers

Introduction

He stood tall, rangy, big-boned. A tether lassoed his hair into a ponytail. Hells Angels motorcyclist? His big paw could easily cup a helmet, but this man was no biker. This man was none other than exquisite wordsmith and profound storyteller Walter Wangerin Jr.

           The Book of the Dun Cow. The Book of Sorrows. Miz Liz. His marrow-of-the-bone, award-winning works beckoned my attention. And now Wangerin was about to give me the gift of a word—and not just any word, but a guiding word for writers.

           To find this word, a word now dead in our spoken language, Wangerin had opened an antiquated dictionary and blew from its pages the dust of centuries. There he had found this call-affirming word: “scop.”

           This long-buried word sounds like “shope”—and now I’ll continue to spell it phonetically as “schope.”

           The schope named a difficult career in ancient Greece, a career that would take one and push him or her against the fiber of heart and verve. After a war, the schope crossed the battlefield to record what had happened. Who had won? Who lost? Who died—or lived? This early reporter saw it all—and had to see. The schope’s effort to see and to record named the event for the surrounding community, and thus, created understanding.

           The word’s meaning then drifted. In the Middle Ages, schope referred to the bard, the courtier one who put to words and music the stories of the kingdom and its people. Eventually schope became a word we commonly use today: “shape.”

           We writers are shapers. We shape life into story. Maybe the story of our day. Maybe the story of another day. Maybe the story of what is or the story of what can be. By doing so, we serve. Perhaps our writing is the way we stand in the world and love.