Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Enchantment

Great minds think alike. Before I opened our blog, I had a notion to look through, "The Annotated Alice. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. With an Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner." Every now and then I get the urge to recite poetry much to the chagrin of my long suffering husband. I attended school when memorizing poems and scenes from Shakespeare's plays were part of the curriculum. Don't get me started or I might open with, "This was the noblest Roman of them all, He only in a general honest thought made one of them ..." Hmm. I think there's a line missing. Must pull out my Shakespeare.

Back to Alice. Let's visit the scene with Humpty Dumpty and his brilliant comments about the meaning of words. "They've a temper some of them - particularly verbs: they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs - however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

And what has all this to do with Enchantment? It's what we writers do with words. We play with them to create a scene, to draw our readers into the story. We enchant them, spin a magic spell and take them to our make-believe story land. My newest enchantment is a Regency romance with two heroines, two heroes and a prodigal son.

See you next time.
Anita Birt

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