Ways of Saying

Quite a long time ago now, I wrote a post about word choice and, in particular, how I as an author choose words in a given circumstance.  It’s not so much a post about answering the question as it is a post about initially exploring the topic, and it’s one I’ve continued to think about now and then in the interim, along with ideas about poetry and prose, all of which are part of perhaps the lowest, most technical level of the writing process, the part that many of us don’t think about in explicit terms most of the time.  If the first step of the technical writing process is word choice, then this post is about the second step, putting those words together into phrases.

To start, we have a meaning we desire to convey in words.  Since this post is not a telepathic vehicle, I will have to put the meaning in initial words before we can even begin to discuss the example.  Let’s say that the idea or meaning that I want to convey is an imminent departure.  There are myriad ways I could express the idea.

These, of course, are just a few examples, and you could doubtless imagine more without much effort.  They also mostly leave out phrases that would convey the meaning based on a shared context and nonverbals, since these are beyond the scope of the present discussion.  The question now arises how we might go about choosing a phrase, and we must go deeper than saying it will depend on context, the situation, who is speaking, and to whom they are speaking.

There is no optimal way of saying something, so it must be dependent upon the situation – the question becomes how is it dependent on the situation?  We might optimize for succinctness, explicitness, clarity, verbosity, or some other, objective metric, but we would need to know why that metric matters to our particular application.  If we were writing poetry, the decision might be in part dictated by the strictures of the poetic form and meter, but it’s well established that I don’t write much that could be considered poetry.  A phrase like the above example lends itself to dialogue, and the decision will therefore be largely driven by characterization – is this character laconic, verbose, educated, in a hurry, to whom are they speaking, et cetera – which is a tangential topic to this one.  In the narrative itself, assuming we are not writing in first person or a very tight third person limited, how does the storyteller choose how to say something?

We might consider slight variations in meaning, the rhythm of the phrase, the way the words work together, and even what other phrases are surrounding it.  The order of how information and ideas are presented matters, with effects on reader attention, comprehension, emphasis, and readability (which is itself a rather vague concept).  No two phrases are exactly equivalent, even if they convey approximately the same meaning or idea, but they can still be interchangeable.  For the author, the task is to choose what will best convey the meaning.  Author’s voice is part of that, but perhaps more significant is considering the audience and the story.

These are the two factors I most consider when I am choosing between or, more commonly, structuring anew, a phrase for a story that will communicate whatever meaning or idea I have in my head: the audience, and the story.  Just because I can convey a meaning in a certain way does not mean it will make that meaning apparent to my readers.  Making a vague reference that only I will understand, for instance, is not effective.  Note that this is not the same as writing down to readers or shaping the story to fit what’s popular – I continue to disagree with the people and editorial tools telling me to confine my writing to an 8^th grade level.  When considering story, some phrases might be more suited to the tone of a given story than others.  For instance, if my story is fantasy, I deliberately avoid certain, highly precise words and descriptions that would not be suited to that genre, and the reverse is true of science fiction.  This is regardless of the viewpoint from which I happen to be writing, although that does make the matter more significant.  It’s a little like avoiding anachronisms, or not describing someone as laconic in a secondary world fantasy where the Lacedemonians never existed.

Although much of this post is structured around an idea of explicitly choosing between a set of interchangeable phrases, the reality of writing is less structured and less ponderous (fortunately).  Rather than choosing between phrases, this process tends to be more akin to developing an idea and pondering it to determine the right phrase, without going through those intermediate choosing steps explicitly, at least until revisions.  However, being conscious of the considerations involved as you are putting the words on the page can help improve the process and better suit the words to the story you’re attempting to write.  It is worth noting that when in your process this occurs may vary – thanks to my writing group, I’ve come to recognize that I am a less impulsive and more deliberative writer than I believed myself to be, with my first drafts maybe not so rough as they seem in my eyes – with some writers preferring just to get words on a page before directing any greater thought at them.

Some might say that, by attempting to explore and reduce to a technical process matters like word choice and phrase development, I am foolishly seeking to extract the “art” from the process of writing and will thereby rob the results of their “soul.”  To them, I assert that describing something as “art” is a shorthand for intellectual laziness, and a form of gatekeeping just as much as highly specialized jargon can be gatekeeping to more technical fields.  We might not have all the answers to make explicit the processes going on in our minds when we choose words and phrases, but that does not mean it is not a process worth exploring.  This post certainly is not the full answer, but it does begin to muse on just what it is that underlies the writing process.