So below is a paper that I wrote for my senior seminar writing class. We have to write an present a paper on one aspect of “craft”. I am presenting on diction, which is word choice.
Enjoy.
Oh and tell me if you see any errors, I still have time to fix them! Oh, and just FYI, we are REQUIRED to reference a piece of our own writing in our presentation, that’s why I talk about one of my own short stories. It’s not because I’m a giant egomaniac or anything.
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Diction: Choose Your Words Carefully
By James Bezerra
Diction is word choice. It is the words that you choose to use, It is the choice you make of which words to use. It is the order in which you arrange the words that you have chosen to use.
That was my longwinded way of saying the same thing four times, but in four different ways, with four different combinations of words. That is what we’re going to talk about: diction.
Diction is words, but more than that, diction is the choices that we make as writers. And we make thousands upon thousands of these choices every time that we sit down to write. More than anything else - more than plot, character, theme, setting, subject matter – diction is the basic building block of all of our writing because it is every single word. You make choices about what your characters should do, what they should say; you make choices about whether or not it should be raining and those are important, but diction is how you get there. Is the rain cold or is it icy? Is it warm? Is it sticky? Is it acid?
Every word is a choice and every word tells the reader something, about the story and about its author and every word should build upon the words that have come before. There is no writing that is not the sum of all of its words and there is no meaning without the words.
Take, for instance, this example of the power of a single word:
“Her eyes were as bright as the sun.” Or, “Her eyes were actually as bright as the sun.”
One word choice changes not just the poetry (or cliché) of the phrase, it changes the meaning and it changes what the next line must be. Either your protagonist falls in love with her because of how bright her eyes are or your protagonist is engulfed in a blinding wave of light and fire. This is all due to one word, one choice.
But how can we know if we are making the right choices? Elmore Leonard, in his book Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing sums up all of his ten rules by saying, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it” (Leonard 71). But what does that mean? To find out, let’s examine the 2009 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is an annual contest that honors the worst possible opening line to an imaginary novel. The 2009 winner David McKenzie wrote, “Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests” (bulwer-lytton.com)
So why is this bad? Let’s compare it to the opening line of the first real chapter in Tom Robbin’s Still Life With Woodpecker which begins, “In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat waiting-with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui-for something momentous to occur” (Robbins 3).
Both of these sentences are made of words, they have that in common. Both of them have a very specific and recognizable style and a clear and strong narrative voice. Both of those things are a result of the words and the way that they are connected to one another. However, it is important to understand that the words are meant to convey something. McKenzie was trying to show off how bad he could be, while Robbins was going for something else. So why does he use overly colorful language that borders on ridiculous if he is trying to tell the reader something? Robbins explained his methodology in an interview with Russell Reising, saying, “I happen to think there can be a fairly thin line between the silly and the profound, between nonsensical playfulness and the most serious and intense creative work” (Reising 467). Coming from that perspective, it makes sense then that Robbins writes that a plane circles an airport as, “a typing finger circles a keyboard” (Robbins 32) and a broken umbrella as, “flapping like a werewolf’s shirttail” (Robbins 84).
These are the choices that we have to make as writers. Whereas Robbins likes to drip words like syrup all over his writing, Leonard cautions us with an almost Calvinistic sternness that we should, “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue” (Leonard 22).
How then is the writer to know what to do? Realistically diction is not supposed to be something that the writer actually thinks about very much. It should flow from the writer’s fingertips because that’s the only way that a writer’s unique voice can honestly emerge. Here is an example from my own writing. These lines are from a story published in the Northridge Review. These lines were part of the story’s first draft and I had to defend them more then once to more than one editor. The character Bellanova is trying to charm a young woman who might be a lesbian:
Bellanova shifted strategies by the seat of his pants. “Are you, I wonder, a lesbian, or just an opportunist?”
She turned back to him, curious now. “I can’t be both?”
Bellanova was a coy shrug. He stuck his hands in his pockets and pretended to sheepishly kick an imaginary pebble.
In this section I decided to overplay his feigned bashfulness and rather than saying that Bellanova “shrugged coyly”, I wrote that he “was a coy shrug”, making him a metaphor for his own condition. While this choice did not work for everyone, I felt that it was the most honest way to convey how dedicated Bellanova was to his act. I chose to be lean toward the character rather than the reader. We can’t always do that as writers, but sometimes it can be effective.
This kind of minutia, is the heart and soul of diction, these are the choices that we make and while we have to learn to make them quickly and almost subconsciously, we also have to always understand what they mean.
Diction is small in its individual parts, but it is the most important aspect of our writing.
Bezerra, James J. "Flamingo." The Northridge Review Fall.2009 (2009): 159-78. Print.
"Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest." Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Web. 26 Feb. 2010.
Leonard, Elmore. Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. Grand Rapids: William Morrow, 2007.
Reising, Russell. "An Interview with Tom Robbins". Contemporary Literature Autumn, 2001: 463-484.
Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. New York: Bantam, 1990. Print.
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