Words

An Element of Fiction

One could be excused for feeling that we’re addressing something a little too obvious at this point; then again, if you’re building a brick house, words are the bricks and a lot of writers have given these bricks a lot of thought.

Some writers truly enjoy the words they hunt down and find, like Virginia Woolf when she exclaims, “How I enjoy the soft sailing sweep of words, coming down inexorably, like my white owl, upon the very thing.”

Or as Steven Wright, the comedian, once put it, “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”

John Steinbeck is one who knows when the pump is primed, as it were, “I am ready and the words are beginning to well up and come crawling down my pencil and drip onto the paper.”

While Pat Conroy shows words the respect they, in my opinion as well, deserve, “I try to write down every word with caution and a sense of craft, as though I were carving hieroglyphics on the tomb of a well-loved king.”

And words are so much more than some inky letters on paper, as Antonio Skarmeta puts it, “You don’t read the words — you swallow them. You have to savor words. You have to let them melt in your mouth.”

Lu Chi has a wonderful take on these critters, “We bring up living words like fishes hooked in their gills, leaping from the deep…. Luminous words are brought down like a bird on an arrow string shot from passing clouds…. Wanting every word to sing, every writer worry, nothing is ever perfected; no poet can afford to become complacent.”

I love Jorge Luis Borges’s amazing view, “I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood. Nobody should dare to write ‘outskirts’ without having spent hours pacing their high sidewalks; without having desired and suffered as if they were a lover; without having felt their walls, their lots, their moons just around the corner from a general store, like a cornucopia.”

And what about Ernest Hemingway’s great view of their freshness? “All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”

The brilliant poet W.B. Yeats gives this wonderful advice, “I only want to use words that real people say.”

John Fowles also admits his love for these things, “The book starts with love of each separate word.”

William Sloane suggests how to make words your own, “Know what each and every word you use means. Look them up in the dictionaries, especially the ones with good etymologies. There is no substitute for knowing words. Love words. Love language. Read about the English language. Read all about it. Get hold of the Strunk and White essay on style and you better believe it.”

Here is Flannery O’Connor’s dry-wit take on this, “You are absolutely right to consider nothing but major problems. My major problem is finding the next word.”

Ayn Rand also reveres these critters, “An exact writer treats words as he would in a legal document. This does not mean using awkward sentences. It means using words with absolute clarity, while still projecting violent emotion, color — any literal quality — by precise means.”

And what would a view on words be without Gustave Flaubert’s view on bon mots, “Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarisms, in order to dodge the difficulty.”

John Gardner, the wonderful teacher, once said, “Words should be windows that allow us to see thoughts or events.”

I have found that sloppy writers tend to hide behind adjectives and adverbs, piling them on to stress something or other. I agree with Flaubert, the best way to underscore any one thing is to find the precise word for it, that’ll spring it to life.

“What is the word for full of the sea?” wonders Virginia Woolf

E.B. White underscored all this with his sage advice, “Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.”

And keep it simple, suggests Constance Hale, “Anytime you can replace a cluster of words with one, do it.”

Jacques Barzun seconds that, “Abide by the general rule: the fewer words the better.”

And I think I’ve used enough of them now to get their point across.

© Wolfstuff

More Elements of Fiction here:

More Wolf Stuff here: