April 13 is National Scrabble Day.
What’s your highest score you can recall? In a two person game (me vs the expert computer), my highest score that I can easily recall is 423. In a game I was playing against my spouse, I remember clearly placing two 7-letter words around the midpoint of the game. In back-to-back turns I cleared my rack.
He doesn’t play against me anymore. Hence the computer play I do now.
But it’s not the high scoring, or a competitive drive that has me playing Scrabble endlessly. The average time I spend to complete a game is 25 minutes. It’s a form of exercise.
I love looking at the mixed up letters and finding words. I also play other scrambled letter games, like Jumble.
My writing works in the same process. I get a jumble ideas in my head and I sort through the soup, rearrange them, find just the right words to describe things. Voila, soon I’m pullin out descriptions of places, people, things. Whole storylines emerge and I can share that with others.
Words get the mess of ideas out of my head and onto paper. When a reader tells me they could “see” the story, or feel exactly what characters felt, I feel triumphant. I pulled exactly the right words to bring the ideas in my head alive to others.
So, to keep myself ready to find new words in the jumble of ideas in my head, I search for words on a little tile rack.
Happy National Scrabble Day.
~ Lara
Lara Zielinsky 