Three authors on how words take you beyond the page

Simon Bartolo

It sometimes takes me a whole week to find the right word but, fortunately, that doesn't happen too frequently. Normally, especially when I'm writing dialogue, the first thing that comes to my mind is what I write down and what the characters end up saying on stage or on books.

Words are the DNA of characters. When I remind myself that these characters are nothing but words, then I immediately realise how important each single word is. There is nothing but words in a piece of writing. Everything has to come through with words. So, when I make words as important to me as they are to my characters, then it becomes easy to create a feeling of authenticity and sincerity. This, I believe, is how most of my work from Drowning Lilies to Sqaq l-Infern ends up sounding so real even if it's mostly implausible or extremely far-fetched.

• Mr Bartolo and Loranne Vella are the authors of Sqaq l-Infern.

Antoine Cassar

Late into the night, I often find myself wandering through the pages of Wikipedia, haphazardly, almost at random. With all its faults, I cannot get over the wealth of knowledge available, the ease with which we are free to roam from subject to subject. It is always full of surprises, connections you may not have been expecting. Recently, for example, I learnt that Anthony Burgess once translated a collection of Belli's satyrical and erotic sonnets; that in Romanian, essentially a Latin language, the article is attached to the end of the noun rather than preceding it; that the Atacama desert in northern Chile is the driest place on earth. Then there is the even greater fascination of the number of languages, alphabets and scripts Wikipedia is available in, the majority of which I would otherwise perhaps never have become aware of. Have you ever seen the unique, enchanting beauty of the ligatures of modern Armenian, for example?

Of course, the fascination turns to frustration soon after attempting to decipher the symbols of many of these tongues. It is a predicament perhaps comparable to that of finding oneself locked out of the most fertile of gardens, catching a glimpse of the flourishing fruit through the golden gates yet not having the key to enter. Like Oliver Friggieri's Analfabeta: "nara l-kliem u noghtor / inlaqlaq u nissillaba bla nifhem".

A single word, even the simplest of written symbols, can open up the broadest of worlds. Literacy is not a luxury, but a fundamental right. An estimated 781 million adults in the world are illiterate. One of Unesco's many projects, Literacy Initiative for Empowerment, I find has a very apt acronym, LIFE. To teach the illiterate to read and write is to give them voice. In the script we exist.

• Mr Cassar, Mario Vella, Alex Vella Gera, Kevin Saliba and Cali Grima are the authors of Hbula Stirati.

Pierre J. Mejlak

Words, for me, are like children. In the hands of someone who can raise and nurture them well, they will grow up strong and healthy. But like children, words need to be treated with kid gloves. Sometimes, it takes just one word to bring a whole paragraph or page down in ruins. Moreover, words are the essence of a book, and for me, books are a world, a universe that is there to be discovered. And you might be right on the step that leads to this discovery, and you will feel that it is not for you, and you will turn away. On the other hand, you might step in and travel to places that you have never visited before, yet which feel strangely familiar.

Like a tourist, a reader is geared towards discovery. And both tourist and reader will treasure memories of places visited, beauty experienced, emotions felt. And like a tourist, the reader will want to return.

• Mr Mejlak is the author of Rih Isfel.

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