by Chris McMahon
Screwing down word choice can be a real challenge. It’s hard to know when getting that perfect word can make or break a manuscript. Certainly getting the word choice right in a pitch or synopsis is critical to getting the attention in the first place. For longer work it might boil down to a what you feel is enough.
I only realised how far you could take word choice in the Masterclass held for the winners of the fifth One Book Many Brisbanes competition. Here my tutor Sue Abbey really took me further than I ever had in pushing the prose. I don’t think I have ever worked so hard on 2000 words! You can read the final story Under the Queen’s Skirts (period crime set in Brisbane) here.
The sort of signals that a word is not working as hard as I might like come to me as a sort of tension or frustration. Often I might realise (particularly on longer manuscripts) that I have overused a particular word or descriptive phrase. This will set me off searching back through the manuscript, prompting me to change one or more instances of it. At other times it might be a feeling of ‘sameness’ or ‘blankness’ in the work. It’s hard to communicate, but one thing is for sure – when you get the right word – the whole sentence comes into focus. There is no denying that feeling of ‘Yes! Nailed it!’
It might only be on the second or third draft that you manage to really home into these things. I deliberately try to suspend the ‘internal critic’ when I am pushing through a first draft. I think that it’s important to get the whole feel and shape of the story in place first.
One area where I often feel frustrated is coming up with unique descriptions of emotion. Someone can only boil with fury so many times. Making that more direct is also a challenge, looking for new ways to experience that emotion through the physical.
Some of my favourite overused words from prior manuscripts are gems like ‘strode’ and the all-time Fantasy favourite of ‘suddenly’.
What are your favourites?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Word Choice”
Nodded. He nodded, she nodded. Over and over. All through the book. Bunch of bobbleheads. There are worse things than using “said” in dialog.
Yup. Guilty as charged. I also seem to accumulate nods – and smiles as well. Grrr! It’s frustrating isn’t it?
Chris McMahon
http://www.chrismcmahon.net
And frowns and grins and . . . I know this is an “opportunity” to do a bit of stage setting, but it seems like fiddling with tea cups, or pacing back and forth, admiring the well apointed drawing room, or tossing a log on the fire just slows the conversation down.
It’s hard to know how spare to go with the text around dialogue. Every reader seems to be different. I tend to try a put a little scene-setting around it, just to give cues as to who is speaking & sometimes to communicate some non-verbals from other characters. But some writers go very spare. As a reader I prefer to have a little bit there so I don’t have to waste brainspace figuring out who is who.
Chris McMahon
http://www.chrismcmahon.net
“Coolly” leaps to mind. “He said coolly.” “Coolly, he aimed at the . . .” For eighty pages. I was tempted to burn the manuscript just to see if the character would at least perspire!
And I have a character who sighs too much.
Hey, well at least you picked it up! There is nothing worse than thinking you’ve massaged the manuscript into perfection and some says – every just seems to ‘stride’ everywhere. Ahhhh!
Chris McMahon
http://www.chrismcmahon.net
I find that I have a higher percentage of egregious repeats in novellas, I think because I’m used to doing short stories. Start a new story and hey! Sighs, groans, whisker twitches, rubbing around the eyepatch, they are all new again. In a longer work, er, not so much.
Hey. You might be on to something there:)
Chris McMahon
http://www.chrismcmahon.net