Mightier Than The Sword: Rebels, Reformers and Revolutionaries Who Changed The World Through Writing

I’m writing my way through a book - Mightier Than The Sword: Rebels, Reformers and Revolutionaries Who Changed The World Through Writing written by Rochelle Melander and illustrated by Melina Ontiveras.

Melander teaches us that the British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton said, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” (That’s my favorite saying…I have it printed on a t-shirt)

She also teaches us that Napoleon said, “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

The first writer she spotlights is Murasaki Shikibu (978-1016), a who lived in Japan and did something no one had ever done before: she wrote a novel.

She wrote The Tale of Genji, considered one of the greatest works in Japanese literature. (I love Japanese literature. Three of my favorite Japanese authors are Yōko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami and Yasunari Kawabata. Have you read their work? Please do if you haven’t)

She wrote it in kana, a phonetic Chinese that helped develop Japanese into a written language.

It is 750,000 words long, all published by hand since it was written before the printing press was invented.

It is filled with realistic romantic and political scenes, and who doesn’t need realism in those parts of our world at the moment?

Melander gives a WRITE NOW assignment after each author study.

The assignment after Murasaki Shikibu is to write a tanka poem, a form of poetry Japanese writers use to express a shift in feeling that had a 5/7/5/7/7 syllable pattern. (You’ll notice the first three lines are where Haiku poems come from…one of my favorite forms of poetry)

So here is my tanka poem -

light settles around

a halo deep in the dark night

st. writer writing

shadows cast from the soft light

beyond a simple table

- Trevor Scott Barton, Brown Eyed Poems, 2021