Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014
Word grazing
Underpinnings
Possibly the most important appeal that ever came into the blog was posted by Maybeawriter: “I have a problem with my stories. I like the ideas, but the words never seem right. Please help!” And later she clarified with this: “Well, it seems like they don’t flow right, or it seems like there is another word that might fit in better, but I can’t really think of any, like there could be a better word for just walking, or the feel of the water.”
Mark Twain wrote this: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Word choice influences everything. Going back again to M. T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing (which astonished me in the best possible way), the reader is blessed with this sentence early in the book:
And so the answer to my perplexities, which must appear in all its clarity to those who look from above, was finally clear to me: that I too was the subject of a zoological experiment.
Mr. Anderson’s style, his voice in this book, perfectly represents my idea of eighteenth-century writing. Earlier, he describes the house where Octavian lives as “gaunt.” I picture a narrow structure with long, skinny windows, painted gray, but not newly painted. When things get tough, Octavian becomes Observant. The term nails the character’s experience. He distances himself from what’s going on to merely watch, and it breaks my heart.
We improve our word choices by making friends with a thesaurus. The online thesaurus, www.thesaurus.com for one, often transports me beyond the words I usually use. And we learn about amazing, enormous English, which has tons, heaps, oodles, loads, scads of synonyms. For example, there happen to be a delightful array of words and expressions for crazy, like bananas, batty, cracked, deranged, disturbed, dippy, dotty, flaky, flipped out, loco, loony, moonstruck, non compos mentis, nuts, off one’s rocker, out to lunch, psycho, screwy, unbalanced. I put some of these on the blog and people wrote in with more. Why so many? Are we all—listen for maniacal laughter—deep down berserk?
Then there are other words that have no synonyms, like poor lonely stapler.
Several kids posted on the blog about words that were banned in school, dubbed “jail” words by some teachers. Examples are: good, bad, sad, mad, happy, grumpy, big, small, medium, love, nice, calm.
I like all words, but I sympathize with teachers who want to develop their students’ vocabularies. So wow your teachers with your fab vocab. Instead of grumpy, give them irascible, peevish, querulous, vinegarish. Use your thesaurus. It will help all your writing. For the heck of it, try for words your teachers will have to look up. They don’t know every single word, either.
And in the stories you’re not writing for school, forget about jail words and words that are allowed to run free. The dictionary and the thesaurus are your pastures. Graze at will on the weeds along with the grass and the flowers. Be a free-range writer.
Having said all this, there are kinds of words—parts of speech—to use sparingly, specifically adjectives and adverbs. Decide which of these two sentence sets you think is better: I stepped back quickly. “Don’t stab me with that long weapon!” Or I jumped back. “Don’t stab me with that sword!”
The second set, right? In the first sentence I changed stepped back quickly to jumped back, because it’s impossible to jump slowly, so I no longer needed quickly. And in the second sentence I traded long weapon for sword, because our reader will know that a sword is long, and long weapon, which is vague, could be anything with a point. Nouns and verbs pack power. Jump is stronger than step back, and sword is stronger (and sharper!) than long weapon.
And take care with words that weaken, like almost, slightly, somewhat. Occasionally they’re essential, but often they reflect an unwillingness to take a stand, as in Hilda felt almost jealous. Let’s make her turn pea green with envy.
Sometimes we need adjectives and adverbs. There will be moments when we have to say a deed was done quickly or that something was long. We just want to give these words an extra going over to be sure they’re needed.
I like to vary my sentence and paragraph beginnings. Two identical beginnings in a row are acceptable (my rule), but no more. However, I remember that no rule applies all the time. Sometimes repeating a beginning sets up a beat that I like.
My sentences tend to be short. That’s how I write. That’s my style. See? You may be different, and even I, when I remember, write against habit and merge two sentences with a because or since or so, because I like to shake things up, and you may too. Notice your sentence lengths and switch them up occasionally. Variety makes for a better read. If you reread this paragraph with attention to the sentences, you’ll see a range of sentence lengths, from one word to thirty-five.
I change around my sentence structure, too. For example, I don’t like sentence after sentence consisting of this happened comma and that happened. I also dislike a series of this-comma-but-that sentences, so I change but to however, though, although, or, better yet, recast the ideas entirely.
A critique buddy once remarked that I often use the verb is, which made me self-conscious and worried. I hadn’t considered is before. Is isn’t interesting, but it is unavoidable. However, now that my friend pointed out my frequent ising, I’ve been rearranging some sentences to bring more striking verbs into the act. Still, whenever I read is in a sentence by an author I like, I think, See, even she or he does it. And Rosemary, my insightful and knowledgeable editor, whom you met in chapter 27, has chimed in to say that is is a disappearing word, meaning that the eye glides over it. It barely registers. Rosemary says it’s okay to use and reuse. So that’s settled.
Speaking of repeated words, in my first submission of Writing Magic, Rosemary found twenty zillion appearances of the word stuff. I hadn’t noticed, maybe because I like the word, which feels friendly and informal—but I didn’t like it enough to want it to show up seven times on every page.
I’m lucky to have editors who are sensitive to word repetition, but I cultivate my own sensitivity too. Whenever I suspect that I’m overusing a word, I type it in a list above the title of my book. Just before I submit the manuscript, I do a document search on each word in the list. If a word appears too often, I consult the thesaurus for alternatives. You can adopt this method in your stories too.
On the other hand, in Peter Pan, James Barrie repeatedly uses the phrase “of course.” I adore Peter Pan and think Barrie a supple stylist. When I wrote my books about the fairies of Neverland, one way I connected them to Barrie was by scattering “of course” with abandon.
On the other other hand, I once read that extraordinary words shouldn’t appear more than once or twice in a whole book. For example, I like the word susurration, which means a whispering sound, because it’s onomatopoeic (sounds like what it means). But I wouldn’t use susurration more than once in a book. The reader would notice. The word would draw attention to itself and away from the story.
(Susurration is a noun without a commonly used verb form. Webster’s dictionary shows no susurrate. Susurrate appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as rare. How interesting!)
If you want to play around with your own repetition, examine something short that you’ve written. Look for your tics—the words that crop up too often, your repeated sentence arrangements—and fiddle with them. As you continue to write your longer works, keep these habits in mind. I don’t suggest you go back if you’re in the middle of writing a novel. In fact, I think that would be a bad idea, not at all worth your time. When you finish and revise, however, look for your repetitions and ask your critique pals to look too.
No matter how carefully we pick our words, they’re still a pale reflection of experience. We can never precisely write the feeling of water; not even Shakespeare could have. If we were writing to the man in the moon, who has never felt rain, we couldn’t represent clearly enough the sensation of wetness. If the moon happened to drop out of the sky into a lake, and the man in the moon swam out, then he might say, “I get it now. Before I was just guessing.”
Recently, some friends and I discussed the impossibility of describing the color red to someone who is blind from birth. We can talk about warm colors and cool colors, a red-hot metal, blood, a rose. We can describe the color wheel. A blind person will understand heat and blood and the idea of a color wheel, but he won’t experience red. In Fairest, I invented the color htun, and I described it, but I’ve never seen it—wish I could. But I can come closer to picturing it than a blind person could because I already see colors.
Writing time!
• Pick a paragraph in a favorite book and rewrite it at least three ways using different word choices. Think about using bigger words or shorter words. Consult a thesaurus. You probably won’t be able to change every word. Now see if you notice repeated sentence structures within the paragraph. If you do, recast them. Decide which way you like best. You may improve upon a master. Seriously!
• Describe water for the man in the moon. You won’t succeed, but create a longing in him with your description, so that he can hardly bear not taking a bath or drinking. He’s so desperate that he decides to visit Earth. Write a story about his time here.
Have fun, and save what you write!