‘What is the most necessary thing for a writer?’ I often ask in my writing classes. ‘A publishing contract,’ an occasional smartass might reply. Mostly, though, I get sound answers: a voice, a good ear for dialogue, a compelling narrative. Yet this is not what I am after. I try another way: ‘Painters have colors, dancers have their bodies. What are our basic tools?’ But every time I am met with a silence that possibly reflects our cultural focus on the macro: goals and their accomplishment.
But can macro exist without micro? What is a skyscraper without its building blocks? Our building blocks are words. A writer’s voice is, above all, an outcome of her particular choice of words. Words are the writer’s palette, her signature. And how can we bring even the most fascinating character alive if we haven’t found the right words to describe her?
I like Francine Prose’s advice to writers in her wonderful book Reading like a Writer: ‘Ask yourself what sort of information each word – each word choice – is conveying’. I think about this advice when I re-read passages from my favorite writers for inspiration. Helen Garner comes to mind with her both lyrical and sharply ironic voice:
An expensive couple in a Bondi café. She’s in her twenties, glossy, slim, grittily determined. He’s pushing sixty and his grey hair is receding, but money is oozing from his pores and she is soaking it up – on her terms.
Imagine that instead Garner wrote:
A couple was sitting in a Bondi café. The man, in his late fifties, looked rich and powerful in his expensive suit. His companion, thin and pampered, twenty-something, was probably a gold-digger.
How much more powerful and nuanced is the first description? Its substitute conveys the same information, but artlessly. It doesn’t stir my emotions.
I am usually the happiest when I manage to write slowly, motivated not by the desire to bring a tale or an essay to its completion, but by my desire for words. I love focusing on each word, in a kind of Buddhist version of the writing process. Such a pace allows me to experience the sensuality embedded in language. During those dreamy writing sessions, I like to pronounce words before choosing them. I relish words, roll them on my tongue like chocolate truffles, taking notice of which ones feel the sweetest. This process helps me to discover the right vocabulary and rhythm for the piece I am working on. And, at least for a short while, the pleasures of words exorcise my anxieties about the quality of my work, my prospects of being published, the state of contemporary literature…
Like the kabbalists, I perceive words as multidimensional. Beyond the obvious delight I take in contemplating the subtleties of their meanings, I also love their flavors – how sugar melts in the mouth… I also love words’ shapes. But phonetics is probably my favorite aspect. The swishy sound of witch… Even my recently arrived baby’s name I chose because of how it sounds – Luca. The choice has nothing to do with the name’s meaning or with Italy, just my loving the soft, foreign, even bohemian music of the name.
Words are the most powerful writing tool I know. When I manage to write word-by-word, I am less vulnerable to using clichés, because I take the time and pleasure in choosing words that are at once surprising and precise. In boring books the air is always cool and children’s faces are always sweet, the birds are singing and the sun is yellow. But is it so, or is this what we are programmed to think? Today I looked up in the sky and the sun was green, I swear.
Words also often guide me towards finding my subject matter. This was how I came to write a creative nonfiction piece Sultry nights in Sokhumi and Melbourne, which ties together two stories: my date with a Russian man in a Russian restaurant in Melbourne some years ago, and the story of my mother breaking her engagement in the early 1970s in the Soviet Union when her fiancé reveals his anti-Semitic attitudes. But before I knew what I was writing about, or why I was telling these stories together, all I had were two sets of words that appealed to me. One described the Russian restaurant:
Most of the women were middle-aged or older, and wore their hair in chignons and drew their green, feline eyes at such high angles that they were like multiple, human versions of Lilith. The younger ones wore dresses that made me look like Cinderella before she’d met her fairy. They were natural-born ball dames – with long elaborated garments having openings and slits in utterly unexpected locations. Their heels were long, and their legs were longer and even the youngest seemed older than their years and so sophisticated, with spray-designed hair and miniature artworks on their sharp nails. I was intimidated – the only one with no evening bag and with loose, knotted hair – and so I settled for the food.
The other set of words described Sokhumi, an Abkhazian resort city, where my mother possibly met her fiancé:
They walked the streets at night and kissed under the streetlights, under the cypresses, under the ancient buildings that had been ravaged during the Second World War and never repaired, but were decorated with gigantic red portraits of Lenin: We shall go forward. Step higher with energy and unity of will. V.I. Lenin.
As I strung these two stories word-by-word, trusting the process to lead me into something worthwhile, I eventually worked out what I was telling and why. Both stories described the same thing – how the foreignness of our lovers can be at once an aphrodisiac and a letdown.
When we write using our lives, writing word-by-word can also stimulate memory. Particularly when I write about my childhood, I often focus on words that I associate with that time. Naturally, mine are Russian words: pesenik – a handwritten collection of famous song lyrics; zhvachka – chewing gum. Each word contains stories I might not have recalled otherwise – how I traded lyrics with popular girls in the futile hope to be liked; how I’d receive American chewing gum from overseas visitors who snuck illegally into our house at nighttime…
The problem is I am, too, driven by goals. Often I desire to have written something more than I desire the writing process itself. When I struggle to slow down, instead rushing towards the end of the story I am working on, I find it useful doing the following exercise, which I also like doing with my students: I make lists of words that feel the most delicious to me. Here are my current top ten:
Strawberries
Serendipity
Metamorphosis
Emerald
Picaresque
Melancholy
Night
Lush
Sashay
Gigantic
As you probably noticed, linguistically I’m into extravaganza, the exact opposite of such purists as Chandler and Hemingway. I love reading diverse prose styles, but when I read for inspiration I need to land in the country of the likeminded. My writerly compatriots are the possessed authors, those for whom writing is sex, those in whose cascading sentences you can drown or whose words you’d want to eat. My writers – Marquez, Bulgakov, Fitzgerald – dance tango rather than ballet. This is because I am a sensualist in many ways, but especially when it comes to language. When I work, I am the happiest when I write about emerald shining through the melancholy night, when I write about strawberries.
Now, what about your list? What does it say about you as a writer? Where do you belong?
First appeared at http://writersvictoria.org.au/news-views/post/why-do-i-write-about-strawberries/
Well that’s got my thoughts all a-jigging. I love lists in my writing to convey distance, sense of place: ..”flashing past signs pointing seawards, Telegraph Point, Passionfruit Creek, South West Rocks..”
or trees – “…crow ash, tuckeroos, tallow wood and sometimes, at the right time of year, the pale pink light of the scented satinwood in bloom. ..” Then I get into trouble for too much description. 🙁
But I also keep a list of swooners from my reading – e.g. “…here in these soft pale days at the lapsing of the year…” John Banville, Ancient Light. How can a string of such ordinary words make me swoon??
Oh, Gabrielle, and you made me swoon with your words… How could you get in trouble for such beautiful, evocative writing??
That is a great list of words – I think my students would have to look up 80% of them though!
I think my top ten at the moment would be:
Unctuous
Caramelised
Couverture
Emulsify
Enrobe
Swirled
Feuilletine
Ganache
Puree
Galette
but only because I have been pillaging cookbooks for ideas with which to fill the upcoming holiday.
I suppose I could manage to run them all together in a sentence, but then I’d probably choke on the crumbs….
Stu, what a delicious list! However, more than about food, I was thinking about the writing voice here and the voice that comes from this list has a large personality. This list makes me think of movement, exuberance and joie de vivre.
That list makes me feel like lunch, Lee!
I named my first baby Carly Maree Drury because it sounded like a yo yo when you put the emphasis on the first letter and flick the rest. She is 33 this year and still loves to hear the story of how she was named.
My father named me because he was charmed by the story of the little girl who lived next door to J M Barry who couldn’t pronounce her Rs. She called herself his little ‘fwendy’ and became immortalised as Wendy in Peter Pan. Not so sure about mothering lost boys though!
Wendy, thank you for sharing these 2 fascinating stories! When I teach writing, I often ask students to write the stories of how they got their names, and your stories are of some of the original ones I heard.
I’m with you. It’s the words that do the singing before the score is even on the page. Extravagant is good. From your list I’m taken – taken – by lush and emerald. They are onomatopoeic in their own skins. Lush is spongy and enveloping. Emerald has a flinty fullness.
I collect orphaned words – those that are almost lost to everyday speech. They come unexpected from novels, stories and essays. I note them down and look them up, wondering what kind of opportunities will present to re-present them so that the nuance, the lore they hold can shine. I’d like the time to put them in good company on a page and see what work they can do.
Good words are too important to lose. Among my treasures at the moment are these:
supernal
skirl
spackle
rill
jounce
recondite
gaud
There’s a leaning towards sibilance in that list. I hadn’t noticed that until now. My bower has room for other sounds too! I think the first time I was aware of the flicker of lost words was when Gough Whitlam described someone – maybe Prince Phillip – as a paragon of a military man. Or so I remember it. I had never heard the word before – ‘paragon’ was a new element. Journalists rushed for their dictionaries and provided definitions in their newspapers the following day to accompany the reporting of Whitlam’s speech. Then ‘paragon’ began to pop up elsewhere as though Whitlam dusting it off was enough to give it currency.
I like old phrases and terms too. The ‘printer’s devil’ is one I came across recently in a book about books. And the words of seafarers. I have no sailing skills, and not much interest in being marooned on ships for any length of time. Yet I am fascinated by the language of seafarers – English to be sure, but not an English I’m sure of. Once or twice a year I leaf through my ‘Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea’, and startle and delight myself with the dialect of sailors old. Lanyards and dead horse, curraghs and navel pipes, spankers, gantlines and beam ends.
I am not wedded to lost words alone. I like testing new words too, adding them like garish costume jewels to the sparkle of conversation. Omnishambles is good, taking some of the load off SNAFU. Notspot is an essential noun because it conveys economically that state of Internet deprivation that we assume is unlikely to occur or persist. There is a story I’d like to write about a professional neologist. A consultant who shapes new words for people who are desperate to name their ineffables or their wisdoms. But I am not good with inventing words so my story can’t catch the wind. I need the contact details for my own neologist.
It’s a capacious toolkit, that wordy one. Keeping those tools sharp and serviceable is part of the craft that makes the art. And as a bonus, shepherding words old and new gives you something to whistle about why you’re composing yourself.
Dear Rob, please allow me to take my virtual hat off for you. Your so-called ‘comment’ turned into a wonderful essay full of original ideas. My head is buzzing now after reading it – lost words vs new words, a professional neologist, the language of seafarers… You have such a great mind and so much passion for words, and I feel this blog entry became much better and richer now that it has your comment there. Thank you!
Rob, you have some magic words there – I called one of my classes an omnishambles this morning just through your reminding me of it!
I also love “Notspot”, and I’ll try and give that an airing here soon.
“Spackle” is a word that should never die – “filler” doesn’t have the same ring to it!
Rob, I agree with Lee in that your ‘reply’ is a wonderful salutation in itself to the potency of words and the ever-evolving tectonic shiftings of language – from the archaic to the present to those words on the tip of the zeitgeist-tongue, clamouring to be created as vessel to new-now concepts.
I love to listen for onomatopeia in words too – could that be why seafarers have evloved their own verancular – composed as it were to the underscore of constant rush-and-gush of ocean, the different trill of winds liberated from the bassy weight of landmass.
Thw works of Shakespeare are also a realm worth plundering for words that sing and slither into the cerebral cortex, words that should not be forgotten, that should be flung into contemporary writing, to make it glisten anew: abjure, beguile, pertubation, bedaubed, feverous, pernicious.
what a wonderful post! I love feeling washed over by words, nuzzled, caressed, shown something complete and new and familiar.
Without too much filtering I just wrote down the top ten words that I use in my creative writing, my thesis and at work.
creative: meniscus; sleep; deep; lacuna; luscious; swell; feather; sea; fall; return.
thesis: grief; memory; wrap; linen; stitch; mourn; identity; soul; liminal; signify.
work: change; impact; outcomes; vulnerable; disadvantage; inequity; accountability; achieve; failure; advocate.
It was quite hard to keep it to 10 words but each category feels like its own truth, to me anyway.
Dear Felicity, what a great idea to do 3 lists for all types of writing you do! I noticed some similarities between your first two lists: they both gravitate towards brevity and elegance and have many L letters in them (particularly in the creative list). And the words you cited from your thesis really tell you what it’s about even though you haven’t used full sentences. Oh, the power of words… 🙂 Thank you for sharing your lists!
Lee, so much to savour in this article! I resonate with your ideas of words having flavours – some like decadent truffles. I give at least partial credit to a divine box of French raspberry-chocolate truffles for the thrill of bringing to completiion one of my more imaginative erotica stories; I almost felt as if the sweetness of the truffles on my tongue were infusing something more seductive into the words and images as I wrote them.
Words have their own individual texture and flavours – yes – and then the delight of infinite concoctions of flavours that are possible as the writer fashions phrases, sentences, chapters, stories … it can make one giddy (and hungry) to think of writing in this way.
I love lists – and your article compelled me to get the words that currently render me giddy – and hungry – into a list so I could linger over them…
devour
lure
ethereal
silhouette
luminous
intricate
viscous
evanescent
aroma
pomegranate
Thankyou for writing such a thoughtful homage to that most essential to the writer’s craft -words.
Dear Adrea, thank you so much for such a generous, and delicious :), response. I love your list! Particularly how it contains mostly adjective then ends with such an evocative, specific noun. I’m giddy too now, with delight…