Wordplay

The magic ingredient in fiction is that special something that socks readers right in the gut and leaves them breathless with joy or sorrow (or maybe wabi-sabi, the Japanese term for that impossibly beautiful combination of the two). We’ve all read books that were perfectly executed, but somehow lacked that magic. I thoroughly enjoyed the word craft of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, but for whatever reason it never connected with me emotionally. On the other hand, Jane Porter’s perhaps technically (and certainly historically) suspect The Scottish Chiefs never fails to wring me out like a dishrag after dinner dishes.

In her wonderful book Write Away, best-selling mystery author Elizabeth George speaks about how:

Writing is not only an intellectual endeavor for me, it’s also very much a physical one. When I’m onto the right story, the right location, the right situation, the right theme, my body tells me. I feel a surge of excitement in my solar plexus that literally sends the message Yes yes yes! to my brain.

National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon, in his essay “The Title Game Exercise” in Naming the World, edited by Bret Anthony Johnston explains it as:

…seek[ing] out not what we know but what stirs our hearts, a little minnow-flash of unshakable emotion—a character, a situation, a voice…. You know you’ve got it when you feel a little tingle in your chest, a flip-flop of your stomach.

In her children’s novel Emily of New Moon, L.M. Montgomery referred to the feeling as “the flash,” the possibility of which kept the main character “a-thrill and expectant.” My own experience is almost always a feeling of my stomach leaping up and forcing the air from my lungs; I refer to it as “my chest collapsing.” Whenever my chest collapses, when I can’t breathe, when my stomach seems to be practicing aerial dives, that’s when I know I’ve hit an idea that matters. Even if it should end up mattering to no one else, it matters to me. And, during the creative stages, that’s more than enough. Even more encouraging, if a story matters so deeply to me that it’s able to evoke such a dramatic physical response, it’s a pretty sure bet it will end up mattering to someone else.

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As people, we’re often judged by what we do. To a large extent, we are what we do. However, because others’ perceptions of our actions don’t penetrate to the reasons behind our actions, we’re often judged incorrectly, or even unjustly. It’s no different for our characters. In a book, as much as in life, a person’s actions are crucial. Readers want to understand this person by seeing what he does. However, often, it’s what a character wants to do that matters even more. In his book Characters & Viewpoint, bestselling science-fiction author Orson Scott Card explains:

Motive is what gives moral value to a character’s acts. What a character does, no matter how awful or how good, is never morally absolute: What seemed to be murder may turn out to have been self-defense, madness, or illusion; what seemed to be a kiss may turn out to have been betrayal, deception, or an irony… A character is what he does, yes—but even more, a character is what he means to do.

Without an awareness of Raskolnikov’s motive, reprehensible as it is, for killing the old woman in Fyodor Dostoevksy’s Crime and Punishment, readers would never have stuck around for 600 pages. If we didn’t understand that Jane Austen’s titular Emma had good intentions behind her blundering interference in her friends’ lives, we would have abandoned her after a few chapters. Even characters, such as Luke Skywalker or Clark Kent, whose actions are definably good, become boring unless we understand the motives behind their behavior.

We never fully understand other people’s motives in real life. In fiction, however, we can help our readers understand our characters’ motives with clarity, sometimes even certainty. This is one of the reasons people read fiction—to come to some understanding of why other people act the way they do.

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All stories begin with a premise (a battle in space, two people falling in love, a dog getting lost). But, often, our original conceptions are hazy and unformed. Sometimes, they’re not even a premise, so much as the what-if question that will lead to a premise. What if a little boy’s brain grew too quickly for his body to keep up? (Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card.) What if an orphan boy was given a fortune by an unknown benefactor? (Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.) What if an assassin was hired to kill himself? (My own Behold the Dawn.)

What-if questions are hugely powerful. But if we don’t refine them into full-blown premise sentences, we’re not taking full advantage of them. The late YA author Norma Fox Mazer explained in an article in the March 2010 issue of The Writer:

When I pick up a book in the library or the bookstore, I always want to know what it’s about. Yet when I’m asked the same question about a story on which I’m working, I stumble anxiously over my words. I don’t want to answer! I dislike taking the fascination of creating a world and characters and reducing it to a few phrases. All the same, answering this question is what I force myself to do for every book I write. Ideally, I know what the book is about (and can state it in a single sentence) before I start writing.

1. 1. It identifies viable ideas. Condensing and solidifying an idea into a premise sentence gives you an immediate assessment of whether this idea will stand up for the length of an entire story. Let’s take the what-if question that inspired my upcoming fantasy Dreamers (working title): “What if what we dreamed about was actually happening?” It’s a good idea. But we don’t know it can carry the weight of a plot until we nail down the details in a premise sentence: “Renegade journalist Chris Redston discovers his dreams are really memories of a world he lives in while he sleeps and which he will, reluctantly, have to fight to save from destruction.”
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3. 2. It solidifies characters, conflict, and plot. A premise sentence forces you to identify a main character (as explicitly as possible: you’ll note my premise sentence indicates his name, his occupation, and a personality trait), a central conflict, and, as a result, a general plot. Your what-if question gives you an idea; your premise sentence gives you a story.
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5. 3. It distills the book’s essence. In the madcap frenzy of creation, particularly in the early days of inspiration, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with all the colorful possibilities. A story has so many potential directions that it can be difficult to select the best one. Sometimes you’ll be chapters into the story before realizing you should have taken another path. A premise sentence is like a mini outline, one that’s useful to even those who dislike outlining. Writing down your idea (and it is important to actually write it down) gives you a lodestone by which to direct the frigate of your story.
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7. 4. It guides you to the next question. Once the premise sentence has given you the central crux of your story, the next step usually becomes obvious. Once I knew my premise for Dreamers, I knew some of the questions that still needed to be answered. What was this dream world like? Why was Chris the only one who discovered it? Why was it in danger of destruction?
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9. 5. It gives you an easy answer to questions about your story. Well-meaning friends, family, and fans ask, “So what’s your new story about?” and you hem and haw, flustered by the difficulties of explaining a 300 page novel in a few words. The easy solution is to offer them your premise sentence. It’s an answer that both satisfies their curiosity and allows you to appear confident and prepared.
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11. 6. It prepares you for selling your work. Finally, creating a premise sentence early in your writing process prepares you for pitching your work to agents, who inevitably require a concise, gripping description of your story. If you start now, you can polish it to perfection by the time you’re ready to start shopping your book.

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Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

One of my best editors showed me the beauty of using a thesaurus, a book I once saw as a writer’s cheat sheet.

1. The inherent artistic tenet that our best and truest work is that which flows as naturally as possible from the well of our creative subconscious.
2. The practical doctrine that if you have to look up a word, you probably don’t know it well enough to use it.

• I recognize that my memory is a slippery and often uncooperative entity that isn’t always going to give me the word I need when I need it. (Daily occurrence: Smacking fist against forehead and groaning, “Ah! What is that word?)

• Why should a writer limit his vocabulary to words he’s known and used all his life? If a word is correct for your story, it doesn’t matter if you’ve known the word for years or if you just learned it. Now, granted, this comes with a big caveat: The word has to be correct, and you have to understand it well enough to know whether it’s correct or not. When in doubt about a word, don’t use it.

• In this age of instant virtual technology, I can click through word choices in seconds without endangering my flow of thought. Although I employ J.I. Rodale’s The Synonym Finder as my emergency backup, I use the Encarta dictionary/thesaurus/translator installed on my computer almost exclusively.

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