The Act of Artistic Composition 

Bringing together ideas, language, symbols, experiences, codes, structures and imagination to form a particular perspective, system, story or invention — requires a fundamental skill known as composition.

Composition simply means putting things together.

Words.

Lines.

Paragraphs.

Silence.

Conflict.

Emotion.

Structure.

All arranged carefully to form an experience someone else can inhabit.

To take people through emotions they may never personally experience.

To make readers feel grief they have never known first hand.

Joy they have never encountered.

And worlds they may never have physically entered.

That is artistic composition.

In the many ways literature's meaning can be defined, it can also be understood as an act of artistic composition.

But, isn't it imbalanced that we creators, writers and composers tend to get so occupied with producing that we rarely pause to understand the historical foundation of the very thing we are creating.

We want to write books.

We want to tell stories.

We want to build worlds.

But we seldom seek to know:

Where did literature begin?

How did it evolve?

Why has storytelling remained one of humanity’s oldest tools of survival and influence?

I’ll keep this concise, you can do more research later.

Literature as an artistic act of composition is as old as human civilization itself.

Before books existed, stories already did through griots.

Before modern novels, communities passed knowledge through folktales, myths, chants, epics, proverbs, songs, and spoken narratives.

The word literature itself originates from the Latin word littera, meaning “letters of the alphabet.”

Over time, its meaning expanded beyond written letters to represent artistic and intellectual works expressed through language.

From the ancient Egypt, Greece, Medieval times, Renaissance period to industrial revolution that gave rise to essays, nocels and modern literary movement such as: Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, African Literature etc.

From oral tradition to manuscripts.

From manuscripts to printing.

From print to digital spaces.

The medium changed, but the purpose of it never did.

Humanity’s need to tell stories never did.

And today… here we are.

Still trying to arrange words in ways that make people feel less alienated.

That is history.

That is literature.

That is artistic composition.

Princess Ella ⚜️