It's Okay to Play with Words

Last night my facebook status was It's Okay to Play With Words.

I love words. I love how they can be put together in alliterative runs. I love how they can rhyme. I love how they can evoke strong emotions. I love how they can soothe and comfort.

I do not love how they can be used to wound and hurt, but as in everything, it is a part of what words can do and how we use them.

Kelly and I have always had this way of talking to one another using uncommon and large words. It drives her father crazy. We like words like ubiquitous and swarf. As we speak our brains are running through a mental thesaurus so that we substitute every ordinary word for something that means the same but doesn't get used as often in these modern times of using acronyms and abbreviations for everything we text.

Authors should flex their vocabulary muscles to amp up their writing. Everything in this world has been dumbed down, but what is the point of that? So we can all be simpletons merely able to understand very basic language?

There is beauty and variety in the written language. It's the careful choice of words and phrases that makes ones writing powerful and thought provoking, and not just drivel that passes as good writing. Good writing should leap off the page and make the reader sit up and take notice. It should also be subtle and wend its way through the readers conscious mind, evoking feelings, empathy for characters. A considered selection of just the right words can bring a reader to tears. I have literally sobbed while reading certain books. I've also experiencing the thrill of adventure and the chase. The Count of Monte Cristo is an epic novel, but it draws you in and takes you on a rollicking ride as revenge is carefully plotted and played out.

Even as I was recently proofreading Kelly's next novel, Teleport, I was running through the thesaurus in my head. Like her, I hate to find the same word more than twice in a paragraph- it's repetitive and makes my teeth grind, so when I saw a word appear for the third time in a single paragraph I went back and blue penciled in suggested alternate words that would elevate the paragraph from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Learning to proofread your own work and find all the places that could be made better by not repeating the same word multiple times, by replacing words to make lines read more smoothly, etc., is a difficult discipline to acquire, but it's necessary if you want to grow as a writer and you want to keep your readers coming back for more of your work.

I never dumb down my books. Brains actually like to be challenged. We have computers in our heads that are far more complex and powerful than any manmade machine. We use very little of our gray matter in actuality. Flex it a little, be creative, learn some new words and use them in context- don't be afraid of playing with words.

For a fun thing to do when you're bored- write a sentence and then do your best to make it a better, stronger sentence. Here's an example- The gray cat was sleeping in the blue chair. Bumping it up a notch or two I can make that same sentence read like this- The silver tabby curled up like a fiddlehead fern while enjoying a catnap in the cozy back corner of the well worn cerulean armchair. Maybe it's still not the absolute best sentence it can be, but it gives the reader a better descriptive image, paints a picture in the mind's eye of a gray tabby catching some Zzzs in a comfortable old chair.

Writers/Authors, I challenge you to play with your words!