By:
Julie Eshbaugh
Hi
all, Julie here!
Recently
I found myself looking out a hotel room window at a cityscape. The view made me
think of the components of a city—streets made up of buildings, buildings made
up of walls, walls made up of bricks.
I
found myself thinking of all the unnoticed bricks that were holding up the city
below my window.
This
observation got me thinking about novels. I started considering all the
components of a novel—chapters made up of scenes, scenes made up of paragraphs,
paragraphs made up of sentences, sentences made up of words.
This
whole metaphor gave me the idea for a series on the building blocks of a novel.
This post will be on words—the most basic building block. The next will be
about sentences, then paragraphs, then scenes, then chapters. Of course, most
things as intricate as a novel are greater than the sum of their parts, so
maybe the final post in the series will be about how a novel transcends (or
hopes to transcend) all these things that go into it.
Starting
with words
Word
choice is one of the most fundamental aspects of writing, so much so that we
don’t talk about it much. But the wrong word can leave writing flat or
confusing, and more importantly, the right word can make writing come alive on
the page.
There
are so many ways in which word choice impacts a piece of writing! Since we’re
talking about novels, I want to focus on clarity, voice, and sound.
Clarity
One
of the most powerful things about word choice is the subtle change in meaning
that can happen when a writer changes just one word. Consider the differences
between the following:
“She
dropped the package to the ground.”
“She
chucked the package to the ground.”
“She
hurled the package to the ground.”
Swap package with bundle and ground with pavement and
the meaning changes even more. Consider the difference between “She dropped the
package to the ground,” and “She hurled the bundle to the pavement.”
This
is a painfully simple example, and the lesson here is so basic and elementary,
. .
.
To read the rest of the post, click here:
~*~
If
you missed my latest writing & marketing tweets, here they are again:
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