What's in a Word?

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

~ Matthew Arnold

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What’s in a word?

Well to begin with, letters, as simple as that, letters are what makes up words. But as writers you need to be careful and choosy with which word you use because just like driving a screw into dry rotted wood, the sentence just might fall apart!
And is that what you want, your sentence to fall apart?

I didn’t think so. First you need to begin with a good strong piece of wood. Okay, too metaphorical here. The strong wood is symbolizing your strong plot! You’ve got a story all ready to build so you have got your solid piece of wood and a few loose screws. Oops again, didn’t mean that. You have screws on hand and are ready to begin writing your story!

Oh my, where do you start? Do you have a character in mind?  What I mean is, has this character been knocking on your noggin begging to be let out of the closet you have her/him stored in? Well, if you’ve got the plot idea, now is the time to let Suzie McQuirkle out of the closet and let her have a run of a few lines. What? You don’t have a plot OR a character?  Uh oh!

Ok...you need to start writing a few sentences. We do that with words. It was a dark and stormy night. Oh that is too cliché. Try something a little stronger. The car was zooming down the wet roadway... Ah little better. You can do so much with the words in a cliché. This might be the foundational piece of wood your seeking to begin building your plot and character. 

Once you have those two elements, start asking the questions: WHY? Why was Suzie zooming down a wet roadway? Was she running from something or worse, someone? WHAT caused her to flee? WHO is she fleeing from? The law, a stalker? Oh my we’re building now! Let’s not forget the WHEN and HOW of the questions, okay?

When you start questioning your character, you have begun to pick up a few more scraps of wood to add to the little story you’re building. I hate to do this to you, after I’m always saying to just keep writing and writing and don’t stop. But stop for a minute. Yes, one minute is all I’m allowing you! Look at the words you used!!! Are they strong words? Too fluffy? Too exuberant? Ok, minutes up. You’ve looked at the words and are thinking, maybe zooming isn’t a tight word, you need something MORE graphic.

Okay, time for the thesaurus. I always have mine opened as I’m writing so I don’t use the same word twice in a paragraph or two. If it is meaning the same thing, you need to find another word! Make it strong, bring home the point you’re trying to get across.
 
The car was zooming down the slippery wet road, making a speedy getaway as Suzie dashes in and out of traffic, she zipped right through the scene to safety. Safety? I don’t think so. She more than likely crashed, or you wouldn’t have told the reader the road was wet and slippery.

See all those synonyms I used. Pretty easy huh? Well it’s not and it takes a lot of skill and tried and true blood, but you’ll get the hang of it in no time. Remember, in writing, words are your friends!  Make every one count for something as you build your little birdhouse, I mean story. A few loose screws later, you might just have something! Stick with it.

Chess anyone?

It is impossible to win gracefully at chess. No man has yet said "Mate!" in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent bitter, boastful and malicious. ~A.A. Milne
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So you were anticipating a blog post about the correlation between writing and chess? Well let me tell you, I can give a really good analogy of a chess/life scenario but I’ve really got to work on the writing/chess scenario.

Okay where do I begin? I’ll start with the white side. This is the team I always go for in playing chess. It reminds me of purity and all that that entails. Strength,wisdom, knowledge,etc.

In writing, the white team can be visualized as the protagonist, or the good guy. The dudley-do-right, the main character of the story. Then we have the black team and they are the antagonist, the bad guys, the dark force, the one or ones that will be causing all kinds of trouble in the story.

We have pawns on both sides, correct? The same powerful pieces standing behind the pawns on both sides too. The pawns can be seen as the disposable characters, if you will. Now you have all of these characters standing behind you vying for a place so lets give them a place.

The rook will be the homestead or the solid foundation of your story, the dark side has an ominous looking castle which probably houses Count Dracula or some other dark figure.

The knight will be the character in your story that does all the fighting for you. They don’t call it the Knight in shining armor for no reason at all. He just might save, your damsel in distress. The dark fights for the light, the light normally wins IN THE END, hopefully, with fingers crossed, the Light will win. (emphasis on WILL win)

Then we have the bishops. They can be your moral compass. The bishop can stand for our values, beliefs, hope, faith and promise. The good seed buried in all of us that sometimes we call a conscious. Now the dark bishop is who in your story? Well it’s the dark force or the bad seed that will not and can not take root because you’ve given him/it no fertile soil in which to grow. He is going to be the turmoil around every corner in your story.

Ah, now we have the king and queen. This will be the strong lead characters in your story who eventually are left standing with the dark side (king and queen) all alone on that big checkered board, or white paged palette we call a storyboard.

What do we do in this position? We do what any good writer would do and that is knock the pants off of the Dark Force and we have our main characters all full of light left standing in a triumphant glow of completion. Check Mate!

Does any of this make sense? Well to my demented writers brain it does. Look out Stephen King, I figured you out! Now lets see if I can see what gardening and writing have in common. Okay, I’m kidding! (not really)

Now we know what makes a story so what are you waiting for? Why are you sitting here reading, shouldn’t you be writing? 

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'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
~Edward Fitzgerald

Sagacious Jowls

"You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country."
~ Robert Frost
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I’m no grammar expert, I know my dictionary and am excellent in spelling. Sure I get a few words misspelled and I’m always kicking myself in the butt for that, but all in all I consider myself a person who spells correctly.

I also like difficult words but surely there is a place for them. When used incorrectly or in the wrong place, you can really throw your reader into a state of perplexity that he or she didn’t sign onto when they picked out your book to read.

I’m reading such a book now, fifty pages into the book and I still don’t know where it is going. The author throws words out that I can’t even repeat because while I have the intelligence to know what the words mean, it just didn’t fit in with the telling of the story. I won’t tell you the book, but I’ll tell you the author, Peter Straub.

This is a first time read of Mr. Straub, and while I ‘heard’ he was an okay writer, I didn’t hear that he was good at storytelling. You can be a good writer that throws a story together, has the conflicts in all the right places and time in the telling of a tale but this man is just not a show’er. What I’m saying is that he is telling the story. And as we’ve learned, if you read my blog, showing verses telling is a big difference.

But not only is he telling the story instead of showing, he’s using these words so out of context that it is tripping me up while I’m trying to read the story. Last night I tripped over ‘sagacious jowls’? I mean really, you can’t find another word? Why couldn’t he have used ‘sapient’ or perspicacious? (kidding) I just don’t know of any writing, unless maybe you’re of the descent of snobbery, where you would use that term sagacious.

There is a place and time for that language, like at a business meeting of lawyers and doctors where they are all sitting around with sagacious smiles, but jowls? I don’t know, that’s a tough one to call. I think writers want to reach readers, and not lose them. If the intellectual of society is sitting around reading Mr. Straubs book, then good for them, but to me, just an average reader, I do not, in no way shape or form, want to trip over words and stumble through very hard to read paragraphs.

Maybe by the end of the book, I’ll tell you what it was about. That’s if I get that far. By Saturday if I can’t figure out where this story is going or what it is about, it’s going back to the library! Then I will get the book Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson (click to read audiobook review) at which time I will not be disappointed because Mr. Matheson knows how to carry a story, research it and make the impossible seem possible.