In his continuing series on
Fifty Writing Tools for your writing toolbox, Roy Peter Clark tells us to
Play with Words and
Dig for the Concrete and Specific or, as he says, "Always get the name of the dog." :-)
Playing with words involves using distinctive, comprehensible words which may attract special attention from readers because they are not overused. Clark says,
Too often, writers suppress their own vocabularies in a misguided attempt to lower the level of language for a general audience. Obscure words should be defined in texts or made clear from context. But the reading vocabulary of the average news user is considerably larger than the writing vocabulary of the typical reporter. As a result, scribes who choose their words from a larger hoard often attract special attention from readers and gain reputations as "writers."
I hasten to add this does
NOT mean going nuts with the thesaurus, a common rookie mistake. But it
does mean using the right word for the job--the precise word.
Clark provides a vivid example:
"Jubilant Mob Mauls Four Dead Americans." The the verb "mauls" is precise and uncommon; the word "jubilant" in conjunction with "mauls" and "dead" is shocking. The total headline becomes memorable.
Clark's advice on digging for the specific and concrete is also much abused by novice writers. Being specific
DOESN'T mean pouring on the adjectives and adverbs. Instead, it means providing the concrete detail that adds to our understanding. Clark starts his column with this anecdote and explanation:
Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: "By the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see." When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see.
Details of character and setting appeal to the senses of the reader, creating an experience that leads to understanding. When we say "I see," we most often mean "I understand." Inexperienced writers may choose the obvious detail, the man puffing on the cigarette, the young woman chewing on what’s left of her fingernails. Those details are not telling — unless the man is dying of lung cancer or the woman is anorexic.
The challenge for a writer is to learn
which details are important. That takes practice, but the process begins by being curious.
In
"The Art of Fiction," Henry James says,
Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience, and experience only,” I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”
