More Than Words

I can't believe that 9/11 is almost ten years behind us. Today, two magazines came in the mail. Both of them were special memorial issues. I sat down and just looked through the pictures, not even reading the articles. The emotion, the bare, raw emotion on the faces of the people in those pictures can't be recreated by anything I write. They're surreal, those emotions. They were singular and unique to every person who felt them, and they will never be felt by anyone else. It's very hard for me, as a writer, to see those deep emotions. They're things that I can't touch, that I have never experienced. Researching and practicing and imagining don't help. There's a time when I need to simply say, "I can't imagine." And it's so true.

There is something about pictures that fascinates me. I feel that as writers, one of our hardest jobs is to actually create a picture with words. It's certainly something I've struggled with ever since I first put down "Once upon a time..." on a piece of notebook paper. Those awful, heartbreaking pictures speak more than words.

I don't want to make the tenth anniversary of 9/11 a writing exercise. It's so much more than that.