The Elements of Story by Francis Flaherty

Author:Francis Flaherty [Flaherty, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

All My Darlings

Like the colors in a painting, words have a beauty and a worth beyond a writer’s composition.

IMAGINE A SWIRL of purple color, a purple so dark that it takes bright sun to reveal its real hue. You love it. It looks like the Nike swoosh, and it has lighter-purple traces radiating from its body, aerodynamic touches that suggest great speed. The swirl could be a cartoon depiction of a whirlpool, or an Art Deco touch on a fancy cruise ship.

As you savor this swirl of color, you do not fully realize nor care that the swirl is on a wing, or that the wing is on a butterfly, or that the butterfly is on a lily, or that the lily is part of a flower bed of intricate and delicate design. You will eventually step back and take all that in, but for the moment you just zoom in and dwell on this one little sight.

Most of this book is about how to fit words together effectively, about how to choose and assemble them for the greater good of the article. This section is an asterisk to all that.

Like the swirl, words are sensuous and precious apart from their role in a piece of writing. They are independently, isolatedly, dissociatively delightful, in their sounds and their shapes and their meanings. Many writers are bewitched by words in this way. At some point, they will see a lovely word in its proper context—yes, the swirl is on an insect and, yes, the insect is in a garden—but often, just for a bit, they will pause on its insular charms. And so will their readers.

So: Write rich!

To enrich our writing is one reason we turn to synonyms for a word that otherwise we would have to repeat frequently in a story. In a piece about the search for a fugitive killer, say, a writer might variously use the synonyms “hunt,” “chase” and “pursuit.” Why? Because relying repeatedly on the same word—“hunt”…“hunt”…“hunt”—saps the piece and dulls the reader. Route 80 is a long, straight, flat, tedious highway that slices across Pennsylvania; use the word “hunt” enough in the tale about the killer, and it becomes a Route 80 read. Take the scenic route if you can.

But avoiding boredom is not the only reason we love words as words.

For another, we love their sounds. Listen to a toddler as he puffs out the letter p, or rolls the letter r like a marble in his mouth. Words that are fun to say and hear: ballyhoo, waddle, klezmer, lackadaisical, chasm, tootle, quahog, fuddy-duddy, doily, lagniappe, cruddy, nougat, thrum, junket, pang, foible, tweak, sluice, banter. Onomatopoeic words—words whose sounds mimic or evoke what they mean—double the fun. One of my favorites is “apoplectic,” which sounds just like the red-faced sputtering of an apoplectic person.

Words’ sounds and meanings blend in rich, wonderfully ponderable ways. Why do so many rhyming words—“hocus-pocus,” “handy-dandy”—start with “h”? asks Roy Blount Jr. in Alphabet Juice, his toast to the language.

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