Not to be Wordy, but...

So yesterday was all about writer's block.  So...

• How do you plan out a story?
• How do you (personally) overcome writer's block/get inspired?
• How do you pick the perfect word?
• How do you see into a character's mind and write from that point-of-view?

So let's talk about WORDS.  


When I open up a book, say Dune (one of my favorites, by Frank Herbert), and scan its pages with bright, excited eyes, what do I see?  Words.  But do I really?  When I read a book, do I really think "wow, these are some really well written words"?


No.  


Let's look at a quick excerpt:  "By the half-light of a suspensor lamp, dimmed and hanging near the floor, the awakened boy could see a bulky female shape at his door, standing one step ahead of his mother.  The old woman was a witch shadow--hair like matted spiderwebs, hooded 'round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels.
     'Is he not small for his age, Jessica?' the old woman asked.  Her voice wheezed and twanged like an untuned baliset."

These are not mere words.  These are brush-strokes upon the canvas of the mind.  These words paint pictures to our eyes, play music for our ears, waft aromas into our nostrils, feed food to our mouths and brush our skin with their textures!  


But you know this already!  You're an author, artist, but most importantly...a reader.  You know what makes your mind explode with imagery and sensation when you sit down to a good story.



So why, when I'm sitting at my own, is it so hard to write?!

Well, I have yet to meet anyone in daily life who has ever described someone's voice as "wheezing and twanged like an untuned baliset"....  The simple fact is that no one talks this way, and neither do we, as authors.  So it's like a different language, in a way.  And like any foreign language, you must learn it and practice.


Anyone worth their weight in beans will tell you that to learn to write with better vocabulary, you must read.  This is essential.  Exposing yourself to different authors, subjects and styles of writing will only increase your vocabulary and your "sense" of writing.  You know, the mindset. 



Here's a practice you can try: take a simple sentence or phrase, and figure out a more expressive way to say it without adding words (only replacing them).  For example...


The boy took a walk along the sidewalk.  


Pretty simple.  It gets the message across, but with little feeling or sense of surrounding.  How can we make it different?  

Happy: The boy skipped along the path.
Sad: The vagrant shuffled along the road.
Angry: The boy fumed down the pavement.

See what happened?  Without even adding extra words, we have changed the emotion and atmosphere behind a seemingly simple statement.  You can see that even changing the word along into down created a more negative context for the phrase.  Same thing with pavement, which gives more of an 'unfeeling' , 'uncaring' connotation than path or sidewalk.  


This is pretty easy to do with a thesaurus, which is what I was really getting at.  I use the thesaurus website ALL THE TIME to try to keep my vocabulary from getting repetitive and stale.  Here's the official Thesaurus website, for your convenience.  


Of course, livening up a sentence is almost never limited to only replacing words.  It's even more effective sometimes to add phrases to enhance or clarify what you're trying to say, but that pretty much goes without saying.


So, what about the perfect word?  Well, that's a tall order.  I think that's up to the author, and what he/she is trying to say with a given sentence.  I've had an experience with my own story not terribly long ago, when I wrote something like this: "...emerging from behind one of the cordons, arrayed in his usual black attire..."  My best friend, after reading it, suggested the word sable instead of black to describe the character's clothes.  It was a word I had never thought of before, but fit perfectly with what I was trying to say!  It so happened that she liked the word a lot for its own merit, which has made me think.  

We all have favorite words, especially when we write, that we like to use pretty often.  Sometimes too often.  That's why the thesaurus is so useful!  A word can be awesome (like vermilion, one of my faves), but if it's overused, the reader notices.   So, when you're writing and you find yourself putting in a word that you're not entirely sure about, or one that seems to keep popping up in your head, look it up in the thesaurus and see if there's a perfect substitute waiting in the wings...

Alright, time for WORD OF THE DAY!!!

Arcuate - [ahr-kyoo-it, -eyt] 

1.) [adj.] bent or curved like a bow; also, arcuated; [adv.] arcuately

Origin:
1620–30; < L arcuātus bent like a bow, curved (ptp. of arcuāre), equiv. to arcu-, s. of arcus bow + -ātus 

Example: The tower that reared itself high above the citadel stood impossibly arcuate, built as an eye-catching monument in its foreign architecture.  

That's all for today's ramblings on words and perfection...  Next post will be seeing through the eyes of a character.

May your quills always be inspired,

J Cole

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net