Fiction is like Legos. It’s built out of a series of different units, stuck together. Each new level of unit is built out of a clump of previous units. The more units you have, the more complex effects you can achieve by moving them around, putting them in different configurations, making different associations, etc.

What units am I talking about? Starting small and working up: letters, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, sections, books, multi-book story arcs.

Most of the time, creative writing advice focuses on things that matter at the middle levels: stuff like plot and characterization and setting that build up over the course of a scene or a chapter or a book. The assumption seems to be that everyone has already learned all they need to know about the words-to-paragraphs level of writing back in grade school, so that by the time people get to the point of trying to write a novel, they can jump right in learning about scenes and chapters and plot skeletons and so on.

Now, what I learned from Sr. Agnes and Sr. Winifred back in grade school was essential and invaluable, and I got a long way on just those basic rules of grammar, syntax, etc. Eventually, though, I came to a point where those basics weren’t enough. I knew how to build letters into words and words into phrases and phrases into clauses and so on, but I wanted more. I didn’t just want to build large, square Lego houses. I wanted to build Lego dinosaurs and airplanes and astronauts. And to do that, I needed to understand more than just how to snap one block into the next. I needed to know how and why they fit together, starting from the smallest units.

Yes, from the smallest. Most people don’t even think about letters; they’re just sort of there. They string together to make words, but as long as you run the spelling checker and aren’t making up your own language, you’re probably right.

Yet letters have the first key property of all these building blocks that’s important to writers: sound. It’s predefined, and the only way the writer can control it is by choosing words carefully, yet the sound of a word can be just as important as what it means. Words with gutteral or harsh sounds give things an unpleasant feel; they’re a good way to add a creepy undertone to a description or a conversation without being too obvious. More smooth, liquid sounds, like oo’s and l’s, tend to make things flow peacefully.

Sound provides all sorts of tools, from alliteration to puns to rhyme. And sound gets really important when it comes to dialog. You don’t want to give your characters impossible tongue-twisters to yell in mid-battle, or hand a talking snake a line like “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” “She sells sea shells,” on the other hand, would fit a snake just fine…if the snake has a thing for alliterative tongue-twisters.

Some people are extremely sensitive to the sound of words, even when they are reading silently; others only notice the sounds if someone is reading the story aloud. Writers who fall into the second category need to remember that there are plenty of sound-sensitive readers out there, and do occasional checks (reading aloud) to make sure they haven’t chosen words that don’t sound right for the situation, or that don’t fit together properly.

You have probably noticed that I’m talking mainly about the sounds of words, even though I’m supposed to be talking about letters. This is going to happen a lot in this series of posts, because many of the key properties of a particular unit of fiction only become useful to writers at the next level up, when you start snapping the Lego pieces together. You can’t change the sound a particular letter is supposed to make, or the standard spelling of a word, but you can choose words with an eye to their sound, as well as their meanings.

Which brings us to words.

What you do with words is, you build phrases, clauses, fragments, sentences, etc. Most people do this more or less instinctively, once they’ve learned to talk, but the real nitty-gritty of how writing works starts with words, with how they work, with how they relate to each other, and, later on, with the different effects you can get because of the different properties they have.

The very first key property of words is one that most writers have heard over and over: specificity. Specific, concrete words nearly always have more impact and are more effective  at conjuring up an image than abstract words or general words. A “flaming sunset” has more impact than a “beautiful sunset;” a “brown car” has less impact than “a brown Lexus” or even “a brown convertible;” “he went away quickly” is less evocative than “he fled.” This doesn’t mean a writer can/should never use abstract words like “beautiful” or generic ones like “car;” only that if one does, one should probably examine them to see whether the “low impact” effect is what the writer really wants (and, if not, whether there’s a less abstract, more specific word that will do the job instead.)

Next up: more about words, with specific reference to parts of speech.

7 Comments
  1. I love immediate gratification. I ask for more posts on writing, and right away, I receive another writing-focused post.

    All that was by way of saying thank you.

  2. I love the way you commented on how the different sounds that words make are important in the whole swing of things. I am what you called a “sensitive to sound” reader. When reading, whether in my head or not, if the words don’t sound correct together I pick up on it immediatly. Often times, if the words do not belong together it bothers me and I need to read the phrase three to four times in order to comprehend. I have begun to realize that some of my favorite books are the ones in which the words come together well, flowing and smooth in the writing. I realize every book calls for a different writing style in terms of gutteral sounding word mix-ups or smooth and flowing, but I myself have always preferred the latter.
    Basically what I have been trying to get to is that I enjoyed that section of your post immensely. Thank you!

  3. I love the Lego dinosaur. 🙂 I really enjoyed this post. I’ve heard people who spent hours trying to figure out how an invented name was pronounced. That always seemed a little strange to me. I guess I’m not one of those people who is extremely sensitive to sound. That means I’ll have to become aware of sentence flow -at least in the editing stage.

  4. I’m enjoying the text-to-voice feature on my Kindle. I upload my writing to it and the device reads it to me. It’s horribly computerized but that only helps to make the awkward stuff stand out even more.

    • Joella – Oh, there’s lots more coming… 😉 And you’re welcome.

      Kellie – Pretty much everything comes together in “style,” which means that it can be easy for a writer to overlook one particular aspect, especially if it’s not one they’re sensitive to to begin with. OTOH, if one IS aware, one can manipulate different aspects to get different effects within a story, as well as overall. If that makes sense.

      Chicory – I think that Lego dinosaur was at the Lego store in the Mall of America, which is a few miles from where I live, and which I love. And yes, how invented names are pronounced can be really important, especially if the writer is doing things with rhythm as well as sound (I’ll get to rhythm in a post or two). Getting the stresses wrong can really mess up the way a line scans. 😉

      Alex – That is brilliant. I’m going to have to check whether I have a text-to-voice feature on any of my devices, because that would be even better than reading it aloud myself (which can also be hard on the vocal chords).

  5. Alex – Did you have to hack your Kindle to upload your writing to it, or is there some relatively simple way to do it?

  6. Joelle – there are two ways of doing it.

    1. Pay a dollar and change to email it a Word file to your Kindle account and it gets transferred into Kindle format

    2. Save your file as PDF then using the free software Calibre convert it to MOBI format and upload it using a USB cable.