A Word After a Word: Lessons from Margaret Atwood

Evan Swensen
September 22, 2025

“A word after a word after a word is power.” Margaret Atwood’s observation has lingered in classrooms, libraries, and the quiet corners where writers wrestle with sentences. Atwood, one of the most influential literary voices of our time, has written more than fifty books spanning fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her words reveal a constant awareness of how language not only tells stories but molds thought, memory, and resistance.

Atwood’s path to authorship was not paved with ease. Growing up in Canada during the 1940s and 1950s, she often found herself isolated, living for long stretches in the forests of Quebec where her father worked as an entomologist. Without the comforts of electricity or running water, she found companionship in books from the city and the boundless world of her imagination. She once described reading by kerosene lamp, devouring texts while surrounded by the vast silence of the woods. Out of that environment, she developed an ear for solitude and observation. What some might have seen as loneliness became her apprenticeship in listening—an apprenticeship that shaped her into a writer who pays attention to the smallest shifts in language, the hidden power in repetition, and the way words echo in silence.

Later, as a young poet and scholar, Atwood faced skepticism. Canadian literature was often dismissed as minor or derivative compared to British or American traditions. Publishers hesitated to take risks on voices insisting Canada had stories worth telling. Yet Atwood pressed forward. With The Edible Woman in 1969, she began exploring themes of identity, gender, and societal expectation. Her sharp humor and irony unsettled some and exhilarated others. Atwood’s career unfolded during a time when women’s voices were still fighting for equal space in the literary world. Her persistence carved out room not only for herself but for an entire generation of Canadian writers, reminding readers that national identity and female experience could no longer be ignored.

Atwood’s works have left an indelible mark on society. Few novels resonate with such unsettling timeliness as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). A story of a theocratic regime reducing women to reproductive vessels, it has been hailed as both warning and mirror. Decades after its publication, the book inspired widespread discussion about women’s rights, freedom, and the fragility of democracy. When it was adapted into a television series in 2017, the red robes and white bonnets worn by its characters became symbols in real-world protests across multiple countries.

But Atwood’s influence does not rest on The Handmaid’s Tale alone. Works such as Cat’s Eye (1988), Alias Grace (1996), and Oryx and Crake (2003) stretch across themes of memory, justice, and the environmental consequences of unchecked ambition. Each book stands as a reminder that literature can probe wounds, question certainties, and ask what kind of future we build when words fail to guide us.

Margaret Atwood has shown again and again that writing is not a pastime tucked into spare hours. It is a form of power—quiet, steady, and enduring. From the woods of her childhood to the global stage of political and cultural debate, she has wielded words as both scalpel and shield. Her legacy is not simply in the awards she has gathered—Booker Prizes, Governor General’s Awards, and countless honorary degrees—but in the countless readers who now see writing as something alive, restless, and capable of stirring change.

Writers often wait for inspiration to arrive in dazzling strokes. Atwood reminds us that the real strength comes in persistence: word after word, line after line, building toward something greater than any single moment could hold.

For those who write, the lesson is clear. Read Margaret Atwood’s work, not only for the stories but for the discipline behind them. Study how her sentences bend irony, how her metaphors unsettle, how her characters embody both frailty and resilience. Then, write. Write steadily, deliberately, without waiting for a perfect day. Words, when gathered with care, still shape history. They can still move stone.

Stories like these remind us how words shape lives—how they can steady us, stir us, and spark change. The Power of Authors, by Evan and Lois Swensen, carries this conviction to its core. It isn’t a manual on writing but a meditation on purpose, showing how every word—whether in a novel, a thank-you note, or a simple message—can echo far beyond its moment. This book invites readers to see authors not only as storytellers, but as builders of memory, guardians of truth, and quiet catalysts of change.

It’s available now on Amazon (http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM), at Barnes and Noble, and everywhere good books are sold.