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:
. . .
To read the rest
of the post, click here:
~*~
If you missed my latest writing and
marketing tweets, here they are again:
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- Adding Sound to your Prose | Pub(lishing) Crawl http://ow.ly/YvReX
- My Two Cents Worth (Before Inflation): Deepening Character http://ow.ly/YvRXT
- Self-published Book Launches | Self-Publishing Author Advice from The Alliance of Independent Authors http://ow.ly/YvS2r
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- My 10K Word Challenge | You Write Fiction http://ow.ly/YvShJ
- Fiction University: Under Development: Writing That First Novel http://ow.ly/YvSrr
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