Spending three session-packed days at the Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing has left my body buzzing as though I’ve eaten an entire chocolate cake and washed it down with a pot of caffeinated coffee.

From this sentence, how would you describe what this conference was like for me? Dull? Boring? Waste of time? Or energizing? Stimulating? A heady overload?

Anthony (Tony) Doerr, author All the Light We Cannot See, wound up the Festival tonight talking about how smilies and metaphors can enrich our writing and enlarge our stories. Since these don’t come easily to me, I’ll attempt to explain my use of metaphor in the first paragraph.

I could have simply said this Festival was stimulating. Period. But by comparing my buzz to that of the jolt of caffeine one would get from the cake and coffee, it brings the reader’s mind out to a broader context. I could continue how I slid home on the thick slippery frosting while trying to calm the overstimulated neuronal synapses in my brain. And maybe if I were good at this, your view of me as a reader would picture me, by the time I got home , as synonymous with hyper cake and coffee. And there would be a larger story.

But since I’ll never be AD, I will keep working on using these “comparing” examples of craft in my writing.

So what does this have to do with the title of this post: L is for Love?

Easy! First, I LOVE learning, and this last bit definitely challenged me. Second, at this Festival of Faith & Writing, an underlying theme was the love of God for us. And the commandment for us to love God first but then to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our neighbors can be anyone. Fellow authors. Persons we interview. Readers we write for. Everyone!

And a powerful quote I underlined to remember: Love is the most important thing we do as humans.

As we race through our days, checking off our to-do lists, what a wonderful quote to keep in mind!