“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
As a writer, the power of words fascinates me. Maybe that’s true of all writers and maybe it’s not. I mean really though, who doesn’t love the word –sensuous ? It has power, it has grace, and spoken with the proper articulation, it can immediately get you the attention of the four or five strangers who were previously ignoring you in the elevator.
It works in writing as well.
Word choice is such an important part of telling a story, and one so often not given the proper amount of attention. It’s the art in the craft. Words carry weight and establish rhythm; they convey thought and provoke emotion; they entice, entertain, and carry a reader to the realm of the writer’s creation. Through words, all of imagination can become real, if only for a brief moment in time.
As readers, we desire surrender of our current reality and rely on the writer to give us a new one; to immerse us in a time and place beyond ourselves.
As writers, we create realities and populate them with the creatures and characters of our unique imaginations. It is with words we breathe life into those realities and capture them upon the page. There they remain in a state of eternal suspension until they are read. It is within the readers mind, his or hers imagination, that the captured life is released and finds its unique existence.
There is magic in reading a well written story, no matter the genre. Magic, woven by the words we choose and the way we use them, place them, punctuate them. The strength of that magic carries the story. The more precise our selections, the more real our alternate realities feel to a reader. While the almost-right words can leave that reality flat and featureless, the right words can infuse it with life and submerse a reader so completely they forget it's only imagined.
Pursuing the right word is pursuing the art of being a great writer. It should be taken seriously.
Knowing what the right word is, isn’t always an easy task. It takes thought and practice. But when it’s right, it makes all the difference in the world.
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
As a writer, the power of words fascinates me. Maybe that’s true of all writers and maybe it’s not. I mean really though, who doesn’t love the word –sensuous ? It has power, it has grace, and spoken with the proper articulation, it can immediately get you the attention of the four or five strangers who were previously ignoring you in the elevator.
It works in writing as well.
Word choice is such an important part of telling a story, and one so often not given the proper amount of attention. It’s the art in the craft. Words carry weight and establish rhythm; they convey thought and provoke emotion; they entice, entertain, and carry a reader to the realm of the writer’s creation. Through words, all of imagination can become real, if only for a brief moment in time.
As readers, we desire surrender of our current reality and rely on the writer to give us a new one; to immerse us in a time and place beyond ourselves.
As writers, we create realities and populate them with the creatures and characters of our unique imaginations. It is with words we breathe life into those realities and capture them upon the page. There they remain in a state of eternal suspension until they are read. It is within the readers mind, his or hers imagination, that the captured life is released and finds its unique existence.
There is magic in reading a well written story, no matter the genre. Magic, woven by the words we choose and the way we use them, place them, punctuate them. The strength of that magic carries the story. The more precise our selections, the more real our alternate realities feel to a reader. While the almost-right words can leave that reality flat and featureless, the right words can infuse it with life and submerse a reader so completely they forget it's only imagined.
Pursuing the right word is pursuing the art of being a great writer. It should be taken seriously.
Knowing what the right word is, isn’t always an easy task. It takes thought and practice. But when it’s right, it makes all the difference in the world.
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