Make Every Word Count
Gary Provost
What Do You Mean by “Writing That Works”?
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By writing that works, I mean writing that does the job it’s supposed to do, whether that job is to inform, entertain, sadden, anger, or instruct.
It’s Not Just What You Say…
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The author’s use of visual images and accessible language should establish more firmly in your mind something you already knew when you picked up this book: Style does make a difference. It’s not just what you write that matters; it’s how you write it.
speak the language of your target audience
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good writers can make any subject interesting, while incompetent writers can make anything dull.
Eschew Verbosity
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“too wordy.”
Wordiness, as generally used by teachers, editors, and writers, has two possible meanings. One is the second definition in my dictionary: “Expressed in or using more words than are necessary to convey meaning.” We’ll get to that soon.
The other way you can be guilty of wordiness is by using long words when short ones will do, using rare words instead of common ones, using words that look as if they were erected instead of written.
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But, of each word you use, ask these questions:
Have most of my readers seen and understood this word many times before?
Will the readers who don’t know the word lose the meaning of the sentence, or will the context clear it up for them and possibly give them a new word?
If they have to look it up in the dictionary, is this the only time they’ll need to, or will they spend more time with Webster’s book than with mine?
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If walk is dull, stroll is simple but interesting, and perambulate is wordy. If talk is getting wearisome, then have people chat, bicker, or shoot the breeze, but don’t let them discourse or expatiate, except on rare occasions. If too many people are getting wet in the rain, have a few get soaked or drenched, but please don’t let anyone become moisture-laden.
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Make a list of ten common words that can become dull through repetition (such as man, book, sat). For each word try to come up with a synonym that is simple but interesting and a synonym that is wordy. (You may have to hunt through the thesaurus, but don’t for a minute entertain the idea that that’s “cheating.” The writing profession has tools, just as any other does, and you wouldn’t think a carpenter was cheating because he used his saw.)
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The overemployment of words generally takes three forms: redundant words, wasted words, and weak words.
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Redundancy occurs when you use two or more words to say something that is already being said clearly by one of them.
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“Lenore picked up a weekly paycheck every Friday.” (If it happens every Friday, then we know it’s weekly.)
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Wasted words. When you write, don’t use extra words that serve no purpose; they slow your writing down.
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meaningless phrases like “in the event of” (if); “on the occasion of” (when); “owing to the fact that” (because); “for a period of a month” (for a month).
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Words are also wasted in an attempt to modify that which cannot be modified, as in “very unique” and “slightly impossible.
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Weak words. One of the best ways to improve what you have written is to throw out two or three weak words and replace them with a strong one that conveys the same meaning
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“He passed away early in the morning, and people all over America cried” becomes “He died at dawn and the nation wept.”
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Here’s a tip for finding weak words. Be wary of adverbs ending in -ly, such as rapidly, perversely, and lavishly. They often pop up because you used a weak verb and tried to boost it
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Change these weak verbs with adverbs into strong, colorful verbs that have more impact.
Spoke boringly.
Smiled happily.
Wrote nervously.
Hit angrily.
Looked curiously.
Touched affectionately.
Departed quickly.
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’t become a fanatic about it. Don’t cross out every word you could possibly do without. Just be sure that every word you use has a job to do
Use Active Voice… Most of the Time
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New writers often fall into the habit of casting their characters as the passive recipients of some activity, when they should be writing about people or objects doing things, making things happen.
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Sometimes, however, you are not writing about people, but about objects or concepts. Even then your objects or concepts should take charge of the sentence, become the subject, and work in the active voice.
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For example, “The car was driven by Morty.” If you’re writing about Morty, then “Morty drove the car.” But maybe you’re really writing about the car. In that case, “The car sped down the highway,”
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The tip-off to these dull, passive-voice sentences is usually a compound verb like was driven or were presented.
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See if you can make these sentences as interesting as that man who plays tennis and goes skydiving by putting them into the active voice.
Ninety-four strikes were bowled by the team from Manny’s Cafe.
The atomic bomb was first dropped by the Americans.
Three rings came from the telephone during the night.
Nine runs were scored by the Toronto Blue Jays in the fifth inning.
The tree was struck by a bolt of lightning.
A speech was given by President Lincoln in Gettysburg.
Be Specific… Most of the Time
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So be specific with items that come in a well-known variety of shapes, colors, textures, and sizes, but don’t put any weird windows in your stories and articles unless they do something important.
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Here are five sentences containing common general nouns:
The car became worthless within hours of its purchase.
The man only had one arm.
He handed her the book before he said goodbye.
She stood on the chair to reach the light bulb.
It was Christmas morning, and only one toy sat beneath the tree.
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Tip #1: Being specific is particularly useful in creating humor.
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Tip #2: Being specific with numbers increases believability.
Say Things in a Positive Way… Most of the Time
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Which can you see better, “He was not a generous man” or “He was a miser”?
“The painting did not have any flaws” or “It was a masterpiece”?
“He did not treat his kids nicely” or “He brutalized his children”?
Show, Don’t Tell… Most of the Time
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Show means create a picture the reader can see.
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Make a list of five nouns preceded by adjectives that tell. Try to turn the adjectives into verbs that show. For example, if your list were loud man, happy dog, old paint, shiny coin, and sad woman, you might come up with: man roared, dog wagged tail, paint peeled, coin glinted, and woman wept.
Try these just to get your brain in gear.
Embarrassed girl
Impatient trucker
Angry coach
Coffee Break
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A writer needs from time to time to get away from his regular writing place, to be alone with himself, to view his work from a distance.
Appeal to the Senses
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Writing that works is writing that appeals to the senses. So always in your writing return to the senses. The abstracts you create, the “think” material, float tenuously on the surface of the brain and can be blown away by the ringing of the telephone.
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You will find that appealing to the senses works especially well at the beginning of an article or story, when you are leading the reader into your written world. “See,” you are saying, “it’s made of the same stuff as the world you’re in now.”
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Think about these five environments:
A circus
A high school gymnasium
A fisherman’s wharf
An auto-racing track
A neighborhood bar
For each place write a paragraph or several sentences, using all five senses to describe the environment.
For example, if your environment were a “movie theater,” you might mention the sight of an usher, the sound of some bratty kid kicking the back of a seat, the smell of popcorn, the taste of a candy bar, and the feel of the floor that is invariably sticky from spilled sodas and discarded wads of chewing gum.
The important thing to remember is that you should use sensory stimuli that are associated with that environment but not with environments in general. If you say “It was noisy at the baseball game,” you haven’t gained any ground in trying to engrave the image of a baseball game on the reader’s brain. But if the noises you mention are the crack of the bat, the whizzing of a fastball, the roar of the crowd, the heckling from the bleachers, and the hush that falls over the stadium when one more strike will complete a no-hitter, then you have used “baseball words” to remind the reader of where he is.
A Personal Writing Style?
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Remember that your primary goal as a writer is not to leave your imprint on the page. Your goal is to make the writing work, make it do what it is supposed to do, cause laughter, tears, fright, curiosity…
If the Writer Is Seen at Work, the Writing Won’t Work
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Writing works best when you hypnotize the reader quickly and hold him spellbound until you’re through with him. You want his attention, and to keep it you must avoid the distractions that will cause his attention to wander and the moments of boredom that will make him search for more interesting material.
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If the writer is seen at work, the writing won’t work
Avoid Clichés Like the Plague
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Clichés, trite expressions, hackneyed phrases, and worn-out plots don’t work.
Why?
They don’t work because any time the reader comes upon a word or phrase or plot that he’s seen many times while reading, he realizes that he is reading. For a fraction of a second the spell is broken.
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Instead of an original oil he’s giving the reader a painting-by-number.
Associations
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One of the ways words work is by causing the reader to connect things in his mind, to associate. Many of the words you use will cause him to make associations. Use words deliberately for this purpose when you can, and edit from your writing all words that elicit associations you don’t want made.
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By quickening the pace of your sentences, shortening them, you can play on the reader’s association of faster pace with hotter tempers:
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Small doses of wordiness are useful when creating a pompous character that you want the reader to associate wordiness with.
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Another way to use word associations to reinforce your images on the reader’s brain is with figurative terms that the reader will associate with literal terms found elsewhere. In other words, use imagery to remind him of facts.
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If you interview a magician he might disappear into the kitchen to get some coffee. If you profile the mayor of Boston it might turn out that he doesn’t know beans about budget planning. A famous mountain climber might be high on success.
examples of imagery for association
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Use these sparingly. Your goal is not to create puns, good or bad, but to strengthen the flavor of your story.
Tone
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In effect, the writer starts off by saying “Please listen to this. It’s very serious,” or “I don’t want to overdramatize this, but it is important,” or “Hey, let’s have a few laughs over this subject.”
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The writer sets the tone at the beginning of the piece, and if he does anything to contradict that tone, the writing doesn’t work.
Intention
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Every time you write something, you announce: There’s a reason why I’m telling you this.
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So don’t put in anything without a reason. The reader assumes intention on your part when you include a fact. You intend to get back to it, he thinks. You intend to make your character more believable with it. You intend to prove a point.
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lot of beginning writers, when they write true experiences or fiction based on true experiences, have a habit of tossing in all sorts of facts… just because they really happened
Appearance
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The words you write have an appearance as well as a sound. They look like something. They have length, size, shape. They are surrounded by white space and interrupted by little marks called punctuation. The appearance of your writing is one more quality you can use to make it work.
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The white space on a page can also be used to influence the meaning of words.
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You can also multiply the importance of a word or thought by putting it all alone on a page.
Write Sentences About People
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Even when you are writing about unspecified persons such as “writers,” or “Hudson shopkeepers,” or “victims of this heinous crime,” you should still write about people, give people something to do.
make people the subject of the sentence ysyally
Don’t Take More Than You Need
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The writer steers the reader’s brain onto a few of the millions of tracks available to it.
Typecasting
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If I’m proposing something that contradicts the accepted social image, I have to tell you. If I’m not, then I don’t
Bringing Your Characters to Life
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Use active voice. Don’t write “Success comes easily to her.” Write “She succeeds at everything she does.”
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Make a list of one-word characters, such as golfer, acrobat, divorcee, singer, mayor, and mother.
Now, without thinking about those characters, make a list of personal adjectives in front of that list, such as irate, depressed, lame, sentimental, and insane.
You now have a list that looks something like irate golfer, depressed acrobat, lame singer, sentimental mayor, and insane mother.
Try to write a sentence or two that shows what each character is without telling the reader. Don’t use any of the words on your list. Try to show an irate golfer without using the words irate and golfer.
The Universal and the Specific
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To make your readers feel something for your character, you must make your character a specific person. You must find that teddy bear so that your character emerges from forty-two passengers as an individual. You must show some specific characteristics.
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But the feeling you’re trying to elicit in your readers is just the opposite. You’ve never met your readers, so you must strike a chord you know to be universal.
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Find the specifics of character that unlock a universal emotion.
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Much of writing has a mirror-image effect. The writer has an image in his mind, which he translates into words. The reader sees the words and translates them back into an image. The writer of fiction asks “If I felt nervous” (universal feeling) “what might I do?” (specific action).
What Dialogue Isn’t
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dialogue that simply duplicates real speech doesn’t work. When real people get together they say real dull things like, “Hi, how are you?” and “I’m fine, how’s yourself?” and “See you later, I’m on my way to the store to pick up some cat food.” Zzz
When Should You Use Dialogue?
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Perhaps the most important when I can give you is this: Use dialogue when there is tension between your characters.
Tension
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The reader should never have the sense that the speaker knew a half hour ago what he was going to say. Dialogue works best when it appears to be created at the moment, in response to the last words spoken. When you have two people speaking to each other, visualize each line of dialogue as having a hook on it that yanks out the next line of dialogue from the other character
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rarely Greenburg tells you who is speaking. But you always know because of the words spoken, the speaker’s relationship to the issue, and the speech patterns
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Try to make your dialogue specific to the character; write words that only he would say.
Movement
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create this sense of movement, of a continuous flow of action, you inject movement, even unnecessary movement, into the dialogue itself
Don’t Be Afraid to Say “He Said”
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. Use “he said” and “she said” and “the potato farmer said” to establish who is speaking, and return to them not with every exchange, but whenever there is a chance of the reader being uncertain about who is speaking
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There are exceptions, but generally dialogue that works is dialogue that clearly communicates the feelings and intentions of the speaker without being boosted by synonyms for said or adverbs such as angrily or sadly.
Dialogue Delivers Information
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Dialogue sounds phony when people tell each other things they already know.
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Heavy-handed dialogue also occurs when one character tells another all kinds of things he didn’t ask for, for no apparent reason except that the writer couldn’t find a better place to provide the reader with the information.
Setting the Scene
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Messages are delivered by those parts of the scenery you choose to show. A city is polluted whether a young man in it is in love or not, but if you write “Romantic thoughts of Ann Marie danced in his head as he skipped through the bleak, smog-shrouded city,” your writing will not work.
Apply the Rules of Style
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Use active voice. Look frequently for the descriptive noun and give it some action to perform, instead of having it just sit there passively.
Instead of the passive “There was mucky black water all over the cellar floor,” try the active “Mucky black water covered the cellar floor.”
Putting Description in Motion
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if you are going to capture reader attention your pictures have to move, too. So think of your description not as a photograph but as a motion picture.
Description that moves is description that works
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There are two ways you can set your description in motion. The first, which you can always do, is to put the description itself into action by using active verbs and pictures of movement. The second, which you can usually do, is to sprinkle the description throughout the action of the story.
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Don’t stop to admire the scenery. Reveal it through the action of the characters and the forward motion of the story. Think of the verbs. Have someone run his fingers over the books in the bookcase or sink into a cushioned wicker chair or lean over to sniff the roses in the vase. You’ll not only tell the reader there’s a bookcase, a wicker chair, and a vase of roses in the room, but you’ll also give him something interesting to watch while you’re doing
Use Details That Work
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But writing that works doesn’t just show the reader a picture. It also gets him to look at it in a certain way.
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if I wanted you to look at the pants as an aspect of this man’s sexuality, his attractiveness, the detail I choose might be tight
Plants
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In writing, you will often plant ideas in the reader’s brain in order to make subsequent incidents believable. Readers will believe anything if it’s consistent with information they’ve already got
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The job you want description to do in the case of plants is to firmly imprint on the reader’s brain the information that will make an incident believable when he recalls it later.
Part 8
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Giving up doesn’t work.
Persistence works.
Make every word count.
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