All experts have mastery over some medium. Certain media are easier to see like a blacksmith and their tools, whereas other domains come with less palpable material. 

As someone who's been claiming to want to be a writer, I've spent a lot of my time disrespecting the medium of language. I always liked to point out to people that I wanted to be a storyteller rather than a writer per-se because I saw language as only a tool to get the job of storytelling done. 

While it's true that the story is primary for me, I'm coming to see how entangled story and language are. One cannot exist separate from the other. The story is language, and the language is story. Well at least when the work is good. It's easy to write a piece that has no story, and likewise to tell a story that is built on poor, interchangeable language. 

But I'm glad to finally have gotten over the hump of disrespecting the medium. I no longer think that language is just a servant to a master. Instead story and medium, substance and material... are one.