In January 2002 I started emailing a newsletter to students I’d taught over the years. I never suspected I’d continue for 14 more years.  It was my way of keeping in touch and sharing thoughts, ideas, and suggestions about the writing life. But in 2016 the local internet provider I used abruptly went out of business and though several techs tried, I couldn’t retrieve the more than 5,000 email addresses on my mailing list.

And since I also stopped living with my then-partner, I moved into a small fixer-upper and the many repairs and creating a garden has taken a lot of attention and money. My house needed everything from foundation work, a new roof and windows, and every inch inside the house needed some kind of repair or remodel. And I’m still at it.  Since I didn’t charge for my newsletter and it required many hours to create and send, it’s been on a long hiatis.

These days I’m musing on how to re-create this lovely connection with writers and am leaning toward creating a Substack newsletter or something similar. Please stay tuned and contact me if you’d like to join my mailing list.

The Writing Life

Wordcraft

I don’t know about you, but sometimes the best part of reading is when I pause to admire a writer’s wordcraft. Of course there is much to appreciate in other techniques— skillful plotting with twists that I didn’t see coming and meeting characters that I’ll never meet in life because they exist in the margins of society or in make-believe lands. And I love it when I leave behind a story world when the book ends, closing the final pages with regret and longing for more. Feeling as if I know the characters as well as I know my friends or family.

But there is something so satisfying about encountering a perfect word, phrase, metaphor, or analogy on the page—the experience sweetens the reading experience, takes you deeper into the story. This powerful allure comes from the knowledge that the writer’s style has elevated the story, has made a moment or sentence more noteworthy. Has made me recognize something important. Let’s call this wordcraft, its own kind of wizardry. Some words merely glance off us, but the important ones find the tender regions within. And when the language of the story stays inside a reader, the writer has succeeded. It usually contains some poetry, music, and lingering effects.

Wordcraft contributes to the totality—the overall mood of a piece and the cumulative effect. These techniques cannot be overstated. For example, mood is an important part of what happens when reading, and deliberate word choices will bring about giddiness, or gloom, or grief. Words also contribute to tone—the attitude a writer is implying, which also contributes to meaning. Sometimes we write just as we speak—chatty or thoughtful or sassy or serious. Sometimes we apply tone with great deliberateness to emphasize our passions or concerns or disbelief.

Make them Shiver

But how does wordcraft happen? There are so many mechanics of writing style I could write about columns on the topic for years. Come to think of it, I have. So let’s focus on layering language into a story with care so that it adds to overall meaning and effect. This means making careful choices so that you don’t distract the reader from your narrative. As a writer, search for precise words and comparisons to satisfy your reader. The problem of finding the perfect word or imagery, instead of the almost perfect word, is no small matter. While the literal or explicit meaning of a word or phrase is its denotation, the suggestive or associative implication of a word or phrase is its connotation. Thus you’re always making choices about meaning and language.

We all need a practical, sort of workday vocabulary that is consistent with our voice, and then we also need a vocabulary that’s the writer’s version of the Taj Mahal. Or, as another example, sometimes the style needs to be basic like bread pudding, sometime it needs to be more like a seven-layer wedding cake. Sometimes the best words are clear and simple, and sometimes they need to soar like a heron aloft on an air current. Sometimes stories work well in the style we’ve come to associate with Hemingway—terse, journalistic and economical. And sometimes a story needs all the embroidery and bombast of a stylist like John Updike.

Obviously there are writing styles that are too gorgeous, too painterly. The same for a style that is too ‘out there,’ too odd to grasp—as if wooly mammoths populate the page. For example, boisterous and unexpected adjectives such as claxon or tessellated or the unforgivable boustrophedonic (all used by John Updike)—stop the flow of narrative. Instead of the reader remaining involved in the scene, he steps aside and engages his intellect. Choosing surprising yet apt modifiers is vital, but it’s not a task to be undertaken frivolously.  Playwright David Hare says, “Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.” Boustrophedonic (writing in alternate lines in opposite directions) and such gets in your way.

When it comes to figurative language, you want to demonstrate an imaginative range, while remembering figurative language adds layers of meaning while also concentrating the flow of ideas. We use figurative language because it mates images and likenesses, connects with the reader’s associative right brain, and helps anchor the story. With figurative language, you want to demonstrate with freshness and verve. However, don’t range too far with your images or the story becomes tangled and obscure. Wordcraft that makes us shiver is delicious. Wordcraft that exists merely to show off is pointless.

Analogy and metaphor are always subservient to the viewpoint, yet always take us deeper into the subject or moment as when Truman Capote described Elizabeth Taylor’s “eyes so liquid with life” and “the face, with those lilac eyes, is a prisoner’s dream, a secretary’s self-fantasy; unreal, non-obtainable…” Don’t you wish you’d woven together “a prisoner’s dream” to describe an indescribable beauty? Notice how it makes you feel the allure of Taylor?

In your editing process, it’s okay if your first draft is unpretentious, just as it is okay if your first draft is blowsy and lumbering. But then, as you refine later drafts, ask yourself if the writing needs to lift off the page a bit. If it is clean, or simply stark. If lush prose is necessary, or stripped down prose is needed. Pay attention to the intensity of language which can range from mild to inflammatory. Match intensity of language to the potency of the circumstance, the sentence, the scene. Note the places in the story where the reader needs to linger and feel emotions and tension. In these passages it’s important to make precise choices, to examine your sentences, and listen hard to what you must say.

If the writing seems thin, keep asking yourself a simple question: what does this remind me of? Perhaps you’ve written about time running out (always a juicy element) and in the story your character is desperate because a deadline is looming as his kidnapped girlfriend is buried alive in a tunnel under the New York subways. It is mid-February, a blizzard is raging, temperatures are dropping to the lowest in a century, and travel is almost impossible. Your reader needs to be practically digging his nails into his palms; as if the harsh cold is seeping into his joints while turning the pages.

If the writing doesn’t illustrate those glacial temperatures, the reader won’t be feeling the danger. And will not harbor visions of frostbite or worse, of her frozen body  like a soldier left behind on the Russian Front during World War II. You won’t conjure an analogy or metaphor for every passage, but you’ll need sensory details, until the reader is shivering and the cold has ripped through him.

The next thing to ask yourself as you’re revising is ‘have I heard this before?’ Clichés and trite expressions are often an editor’s first tip off that you’re a lazy or unimaginative writer. “Clichés are the old coins of language: phrases that once made a striking impression but have since been rubbed smooth by repeated handling.”

Glissando

Glissando is a term from music meaning sliding or gliding over keys. When applied to wordcraft, pay attention to the sound and flow of language. Sounds arrest the reader’s attention. Even if your words are not read out loud, the reader hears them with his inner ear. All language has sound and sound communicates meaning, emotion, mood and tone. Language is also embedded with deeply appealing rhythms that, like drum beats, slip into the reader’s consciousness and enhance the experience of reading.   In all writing every word exists for a reason, every sentence builds the scene or idea. Sometimes you want sound to lull a reader before you slap him with a heated argument or stage a bombshell scene. Sometimes you want him to pause at the end of a string of words. Sometimes you want to march along briskly as you dispense information.

When sound is emphasized a narrative becomes poetic. When sound is deliberately employed, sentences, paragraphs and scenes have clout. Writing without themes, purpose and music is only typing and writing without paying attention to sound is flat and empty.

Sound can add or subtract to the flow of writing.  Like other writing devices, flow is a nearly invisible factor, but when it’s employed, your writing will be seamless and smooth and graceful. But without flow your writing happens in fits and jerks; it flounders on the page, topics isolated like ice floes in a vast sea.

Flow happens when ideas and stories have fluidity, connectivity, and cohesion.  Flow is consciously applied as a courtesy to the reader because readers deeply resent being lost of confused when amidst a page or story. Readers also hate to be jolted or to dangle, or feel a sense of disorientation.  Flow provides the map, flow connects the dots, flow grants readers firm footing. Flow aids the internal logic needed to make your ideas comprehensible.  Flow will move the reader from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, idea to idea, scene to scene, and chapter to chapter with grace and ease.

An essential technique that creates flow is transitions and it’s shocking how often writers neglect to use them.  Transitions are the words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs used to bridge what has been said with what is going to be said. Simple transitions are generally, but not always, a subordinate clause placed in the beginning of a sentence or paragraph and used as a road sign indicating a change. Probably the most famous transition in writing is “meanwhile, back at the ranch.” It provides an easy shorthand and the reader knows, Ah, we’ve changed locales; we’re at the ranch again. Wonder how Ellie is getting along since Jed has been on the cattle drive for three months now.

Transitions are handy devices because they can accomplish so much in only a few words. Their jobs are to signal: a change in time, a change in place, a shift in mood or tone, or a shift in point of view. Transitions also clarify relationships, emphasize, contrast or compare things, conclude actions or thoughts, and create associations.

Here are some quick tips for writing with wordcraft.

• When in doubt, understate. Often the most painful, emotional, or violent moments in writing works best by using a minimalist approach.
• Write about subjects that mean something to you, emotionally and intellectually; that force you to question your beliefs and values.
• Save lush passages for choice moments in the story, especially decisions, revelations, and reversals. If you use heightened prose every time your character feels an emotion the whole will become contrived.
• Omit redundancies like grotesquely ugly, grim reminders, complete surprise, and happy coincidence.
• Make certain every sentence adds something new.
• Generally avoid heightened prose for endings—often the best endings are concrete or understated.
• Respect word territory. If you feature an unusual word in a sentence (effervescent, rococo, unremunerated, infelicity) then don’t repeat it again in a nearby paragraph or better yet, use it only once.

Don’t forget to keep asking yourself, what does this remind me of?  As you lay out sentences and scenes, but also as go through your days, look around you with an artist’s curiosity.  It’s a simple question, and leads to wizardry.

***************************************************************************

The mornings are sometimes wet here and the day begins with a strange silver slant or a descending gloom. The plum and cherry trees are festooned in white and soft pink blossoms and petals are drifting on the wind, dropping onto the ground. There’s something so transporting about these blooming tees, like you’re walking amid a storybook. It’s so fascinating how the different seasons and hours have such am impact on a place. How each season has a mood and rhythm all its own. I’m starting to garden again, adding and subtracting from my successes and failures, always envisioning the future and color.

*****************************************************************

Inspiration

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. — Tom Stoppard

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make. ~ Truman Capote

We are all lying in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars ~ Oscar Wilde

Before you use a fancy word, make room for it. ~ Joseph Joubert

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. ~ Mark Twain

I put the words down and push them a bit. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I would do for you what spring does for the cherry trees.  ~ Pablo Neruda

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. ~  Rudyard Kipling

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother. ~ Richard Peck

*****************************************************************

The Writing Life newsletter is copyrighted material and may only be reprinted with permission from the author.