Art by Leeloo, Photo by CatA recent Locus Roundtable question led me to thinking about this. It starts with a confession: I read dictionaries, a habit since early, early years of Richard Scarry.
Not cover to cover, as you would a novel. Rather I pick them up, flip through the pages, pause to dip into them in search of new words to file away mentally. I relish new words so I’m always looking for them, especially sinewy and interesting new verbs, or nouns crusted with bits of morphological history.
I know I’m not alone in this — it’s a disease that many (though certainly not all, or even most, I think) writers (and some non-writers) share, and it’s not one its sufferers talk about much, because Good LORD how boring is that, reading the dictionary?
I have an American Heritage I’ll never part with, and beyond that the beloved Compact OED, three volumes and accompanying magnifying glass, that my brother Lowell got for me while I was in grad school and which will be with me till my dying days, I firmly well. And specialized dictionaries: a Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, a dictionary of foreign terms, another of fashion terms, and a glut of foreign language dictionaries, Russian, Hawaiian, Navaho, jostle for space on one on my most visited bookshelves.
Morphology — the history built into the syllables — fascinates me. That the proto Indo-European word “dwoh” (two) leads to words like double and duo and duplicate and duplicity (two-facedness) is just too cool. In my junior year of high school we had a vocabulary textbook that focused on roots – each section was several roots along with lengthy lists of words derived from them. I loved the idea that you could take a word apart and find its meaning built into it with the syllables of which it was made.
When I was in grad school, we had evenings of pot-luck suppers followed by play reading or rounds of the dictionary game (for which the aforementioned American Heritage was often employed). I will argue that playing word-games can be fun, but that playing it with clever writers can be intoxicating and exhilarating (note the shared root with “hilarity” there) and make you laugh so hard and long your face hurts. My all-time favorite remains the false definition for the word “nidor” – Naval acronym employed when inspecting submarines, stands for Nothing Is Damp Or Rusted.
Sometimes self-consciousness overtakes me. In high school a girl once asked me why I talked “so snobby,” an accusation that still pokes me on occasion. It’s a reason I like talking to other writers — no one views a previously unknown word as a hostile act but rather a gem that duplicates itself in the sharing. No one’s the poorer for talking to someone whose vocabulary stretches them.
Nothing jars on me quite so much as a word used in a half-right fashion, a square peg hammered down into that round hole and MADE to fit through sheer Humpty-Dumptyian insistence (an Alice in Wonderland reference that all we word-lovers know, go read the book if you never have, particularly if you’re a fantasy writer).
What about you? What are the words or word sources that you particularly love?
The notion of using a word in a “half-right fashion” is circular; the way that lexicographers know what the “right” definition of word is is by deducing its meaning from how people use it. Words aren’t manufactured in a dictionary and then released into the world of speakers and writers, where some people just don’t get them right. It’s the other way around.
Of course, people can argue that a word “should” mean this-and-that, based on its etymology, its historical use (evidence that’s often not nearly as concrete as is sometimes imagined, especially for “hard” or commonly “misused” words), or of course based on what a lexicographer has written. But the lexicon of the demotic has never been successfully corralled into boundaries established by dictionaries. People use words they way they will, and lexicographers in general consider their job not to be leading the crowd, but trying to keep up with it.
All that said, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible for people to use a word incorrectly. Individuals of course might simply have the wrong definition in their heads. A friend of mine has a favorite example where he says for a long time he thought the word “erstwhile” meant “distinguished.” And I’m sure I’ve corrected my misunderstanding of dozens (hundreds) words like that plus continue to have a healthy collection of words whose meanings I don’t have quite right. In those cases, tho, the writer is not insisting on a new meaning, I don’t think, and would not be obstinate about their intent. Then again … 🙂
I love dictionaries and encyclopedias, too. I collect words like a child collects pretty rocks. Ha–I collect those, too.
I remember being asked to ‘shut up’ by my ninth grade teacher when I corrected her use of a gerund. After that, I didn’t speak in a single class unless called upon until college. Where I was told to shut up by a very bad English prof, again. In grad school, I diagrammed a poorly written
sentence in the midst of a debate about what the first-year guidebook said was expected of us grad students on our second-year competency exams. The prof, a very proper British archaeologist, threatened violence when I showed the sentence was poorly constructed, because the modifier was on the verb. Turns out she’d written it.
Nowhere have I found as much love for words as in the midst of fellow writers. Even my linguist friends are less excited by them, I think.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
When Can You Get Away with Wordy Prose?
The following comes from an email exchange between myself and John Barnes, whose story I critiqued and who has given permission to reprint the exchange 🙂 I know that this question often comes up for newer writers. They see writers who write long, elaborate sentences and wonder why they then get criticized for overly long and complicated sentences.
John: When you said to work on writing on a sentence /paragraph level, were you referring to sentence structure or cutting needless words? Was it well-written? Would a good play on muscle memory to intersperse the story with flashes of memory, along the lines of what Aliette De Bodarde did with immersion?
The answer to the question in the first sentence is yes to both. I think that you are at a point in your writing where you should both be looking at constructing interesting, graceful sentences as well as making sure that you remove excess words. Extraneous language often gets in the way of a story’s speaking to a reader, muffling its impact.
I thought the language was competent, but still needs the final polish that removes any awkwardness or places where the prose calls attention to itself. One of the ways a writer convinces the reader to relax and give into the experience of the story is by convincing them they are in expert hands that will keep reminders that they are reading to a minimum. Awkward sentences or passages that are overly wordy can remind a reader that they are reading and generally are experienced as a negative rather than a positive.
Absolutely a good play on muscle memory that intersperses the story with flashes of memory would be great. To make it superlative, the language needs to be constructed as clearly as possible. If you go over “Immersion,” you will see that in every sentence, words are pulling their weight and there are no extras.
John: Thanks, so keep it simple then? What about writers like Cat Valente or Laird Barron who usually have flowery prose in their writing? On Neil Clarke’s sub page for Clarkesworld he says “language is important, there’s no distinction between “style” and “substance” or “story” and “writing”. What exactly did he mean by that? I only ask because you have many stories published in their issues and that ezine is like the uncatchable unicorn for writers like me. lol Thanks again.
If you look at Cat Valente or Laird Barron’s prose you’ll see that although it is flowery, every word in it is still doing something.
To see what I mean, let’s look at a passage from both of them. Here is one of Valente’s, from Silently and Very Fast in Clakesworld:
Ravan told me these stories. He set up a great hexagonal library in his Interior, as dusty and dun-colored and labyrinthine as any ancient scriptorium. He made himself a young novice with a fresh-shaven tonsure, and me a country friar with a red, brandy-drinking nose. He showed me the illuminator’s table, and a great book whose pages had golden edges and illuminations in cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple, and the images showed great machine armies trampling men underfoot. They showed cruel metal faces and distant, god-like clouds of intellect: incomprehensible and vast and uncaring. They showed the Good Robot desperately asking what love was. They showed fatal malfunctions and mushroom clouds. They showed vicious weapons and hopeless battles, noble men and women with steady gazes facing down their cruel and unjust artificial children, who gave no mercy.
These are complex sentences at times. They employ poetic techniques, such as the repetition of “They showed” as well as the deliberately repeated conjunction “and” of “cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple”. Notice how the “They showed” becomes like pages flipping.
But there are no extraneous words, no words that are not accomplishing at least several of the following duties: constructing a world for the reader, conveying information about the world, creating a specific tone, amplifying the engaging nature of the prose with sensory detail, providing aural delight when mentally read, providing beautiful or entertaining language, etc.
Here’s a passage from Laird Barron’s Blood & Stardust, which features a protagonist that has some similarities with yours.
My nerves weren’t always so frayed; once, I was too dull to fear anything but the Master’s voice and his lash. I was incurious until my fifth or sixth birthday and thick as a brick physically and intellectually. Anymore, I read anything that doesn’t have the covers glued shut. I devour talk radio and Oprah. Consequently, my neuroses have spread like weeds. Am I getting fat? Yes, I’ve got the squat frame of a Bulgarian power lifter, but at least my moles and wens usually distract the eye from my bulging trapeziuses and hairy arms.
I also dislike the dark, and wind, and being trussed hand and foot and left hanging in a closet. Dr. Kob used to give me the last as punishment; still does it now and again, needed or not, as a reminder. Perspective is extremely important in the Kob house. The whole situation is rather pathetic, because chief among his eccentric proclivities, he’s an amateur storm chaser. Tornadoes and cyclones don’t interest him so much as lightning and its capacity for destruction and death. Up until his recent deteriorating health, we’d bundle into the van and cruise along the coast during storm season and shoot video, and perform field tests of his arcane equipment. Happily, those days seem to be gone, and none too soon. It’s rumored my predecessor, daughter numero uno, was blown to smithereens, and her ashes scattered upon the tides, during one of those summer outings.
Here again, sentences are leanly fleshed and adverbs like “rather” and “extremely” are used sparingly. Notice that sentences are not uniformly long. The average sentence is 12 words long, so let’s see how Barron’s passage maps against that. Its sentences by word count go 20/17/11/5/7/4/29/20/23/8/17/30/11/24. Looking at that, you can see how although usually sentences are longer than average, some short ones are interspersed, creating what I would describe as texture or perhaps rhythm, to the writing. Along the same lines, look at the Valente sentences by word count: 5/20/20/34/16/10/7/26.
This is important but subtle stuff, and I am not suggesting that anyone needs to go through and count the words in their sentences, just that they do need to consider length. Writers don’t have to just construct stories on the level of character and situation. They must also convey that story through sentences that are constructed as optimally as possible to deliver the experience of the story to the reader.
I think this is why it Neil Clarke is referencing on the submissions page. He wants stories that pay attention not just to the plotting, that the language in which it is conveyed and the skill with which the experience is created for the reader. This is one of the hard to acquire but essential skills that end up elevating writing from good to great, in my opinion.
John: Thanks for clearing that up, now that I look at it more closely, I can see that the sentences aren’t that complex, just seem dense when read as a whole. And there are very few “dress-up” words. Does a writer need poetic techniques to give the story quality? Asimov’s and some of the work in F&SF have pretty transparent prose?
I don’t know that a writer needs poetic techniques, but they certainly help. A story has to have some reason for the reader to want to keep going — beauty of style helps but it’s not enough. There must also be plot and the characters and the cool world-building, etc. Some writers get by on something else and stick to a very plain — and sometimes downright awkward, hence my reluctance to say “needs” — prose, but they’re going full out with killer plots or heart-wringing characters or snappy dialogue, all in spades.
For me sometimes a dense style — one with conscious use of poetic technique, symbology, and sensory input — has worked well, and it is something that seems to appeal to Clarkesworld.
Here’s a sample passage from The Worm Within, which appeared there. It’s meant to be read aloud, and plays with repeated sounds. It’s also an unreliable narrator and the sentence structures are meant to provide a sense of unease in the reader, as are some of the sensory details.
But after only a single pirouette, my inner tenant stirs. He plucks pizzicato at my spine, each painful twang reminding me of his presence, somewhere inside.
He says, They’ll find you soon enough TICK they’ll hunt you down. They’ll realize TICK what you are, a meat-puppet in a TICK robot world, all the shiny men and women and TICK in-betweens will cry out, knowing what you are. They’ll find TICK you. They’ll find you.
Here is a section where I use plainer language, in another Clarkesworld story, “The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”.
Sometimes I used to imagine crashing her on a reef and swimming away, leaving her to be covered with birdshit and seaweed, her voice lasting, pleading, as long as the batteries held out. Sometimes I used to imagine taking one of the little cutting lasers, chopping away everything but her defenseless brainbox, deep in the planking below the cabin, then severing its inputs one by one, leaving her alone. Sometimes I imagined worse things.
I inherited her from my uncle Fortunato. My uncle loved his boat like a woman, and she’d do things for him, stretch out the last bit of fuel, turn just a bit sharper, that she wouldn’t do for me or anyone else. Like an abandoned woman, pining for a lover who’d moved on. I could have the AI stripped down and retooled, re-imprint her, but I’d lose all her knowledge. Her ability to recognize me.
I tried in this passage to convey something about the main character’s emotional state. When it breaks into more poetic language with the repeated “Sometimes I used to imagine beginning each sentence” the repeated structure is intended to intensify the emotion that underlines the passage, the deep anger that the protagonist feels towards the Mary Magdalena.
In conclusion, I hope these examples have shown that studying poetry is not time wasted for a writer, particularly when learning strategies involving repeated sounds, rhythms, and figures of speech. That sort of attention to detail is what leads to the degree of skill that allows a writer to get away with “wordy” prose.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
Tips For Writers: Examining Your Own Writing Process
We had the first session of the advanced workshop last night. I’m delighted by the mix, and expecting wonderful things from the class. Some are published already, some are just breaking in.
Unlike the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories class, we are not focusing on one of the basics each week, like characters, plot, or world building. Instead, I am trying to let the class drive itself where it can. My hope is that everyone, by the end of class, has not just been critiqued a couple of times, but has a better sense of their writerly process and how to make it more efficient, more confidence in finishing stuff and getting it sent out, and new ways of moving story from idea to finished draft.
So here is the assignment I gave them, in the hope that it will prove useful for other writers trying to figure out their process:
I asked them each to make an account at the Submissions Grinder, even if they already were tracking their stories in another way. I said I would like them to send out at least one submission and track it in the grinder, but if they couldn’t manage that, then I wanted them to identify at least one market that they wanted to send something to. We spent some time looking at my old submissions spreadsheet, since the question came up, after how many rejections do you trunk story? My answer is that you don’t trunk a story unless you would find it embarrassing to be published. I have some stories that were out over a dozen places before finally finding a home.
We did an in class writing exercise to make them think about their writing process. I want to them to try varying their process three times over the course of the next week. They can vary their process spatially, by changing the location where they write: outside under a tree or in a coffee shop or at the library or in their closet. Or they can vary it temporally by writing at a different time than they usually do. Or they can vary it according to process: using pen and paper instead of the keyboard, for one, or by writing with outline if they don’t usually use one. Or they can even look at their work and see if there is a pattern they want to vary, such as always writing in past tense.
Finally, they were assigned to read this and come in prepared to talk about how the writer creates emotion in the reader. That’s a piece that I personally cannot read without crying, so I think it will prove an interesting discussion, and hopefully provide some guidance for creating depth of emotion in their own work.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
3 Responses
The notion of using a word in a “half-right fashion” is circular; the way that lexicographers know what the “right” definition of word is is by deducing its meaning from how people use it. Words aren’t manufactured in a dictionary and then released into the world of speakers and writers, where some people just don’t get them right. It’s the other way around.
Of course, people can argue that a word “should” mean this-and-that, based on its etymology, its historical use (evidence that’s often not nearly as concrete as is sometimes imagined, especially for “hard” or commonly “misused” words), or of course based on what a lexicographer has written. But the lexicon of the demotic has never been successfully corralled into boundaries established by dictionaries. People use words they way they will, and lexicographers in general consider their job not to be leading the crowd, but trying to keep up with it.
All that said, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible for people to use a word incorrectly. Individuals of course might simply have the wrong definition in their heads. A friend of mine has a favorite example where he says for a long time he thought the word “erstwhile” meant “distinguished.” And I’m sure I’ve corrected my misunderstanding of dozens (hundreds) words like that plus continue to have a healthy collection of words whose meanings I don’t have quite right. In those cases, tho, the writer is not insisting on a new meaning, I don’t think, and would not be obstinate about their intent. Then again … 🙂
I love dictionaries and encyclopedias, too. I collect words like a child collects pretty rocks. Ha–I collect those, too.
I remember being asked to ‘shut up’ by my ninth grade teacher when I corrected her use of a gerund. After that, I didn’t speak in a single class unless called upon until college. Where I was told to shut up by a very bad English prof, again. In grad school, I diagrammed a poorly written
sentence in the midst of a debate about what the first-year guidebook said was expected of us grad students on our second-year competency exams. The prof, a very proper British archaeologist, threatened violence when I showed the sentence was poorly constructed, because the modifier was on the verb. Turns out she’d written it.
Nowhere have I found as much love for words as in the midst of fellow writers. Even my linguist friends are less excited by them, I think.
I’m addicted to etymological dictionaries. I usually use them online, though
Oxford has recently come out with a new, historical thesaurus that I absolutely need to get at some point. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Reference/?ci=9780199208999&view=usa
That looks pretty darn amazing and will take up a lot of my time.