Lovely Language

Tell a better story.

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Anton Chekhov

This publication offers suggestions for everyday writing, meaning the writing that everybody does. As opposed to the writing of novelists, playwrights, poets, memoirists, journalists, and the like.

But these various types of writing aren’t mutually exclusive: some writerly techniques are helpful to people writing letters (especially the odious holiday recount of the year), encouraging their kid to finish her term paper, sending sympathy cards, or myriad other day-to-day jottings. And vice versa: as a member of the great proletariat, I often feel that snobby creative writers could do with a bit of down-to-earth advice about everyday writing, too.

LibreTexts, a social sciences site in an academic open-text collaborative on post-secondary education, suggests more instances in which good writing can come in handy:

Have you ever gotten lost because someone gave you directions that didn’t make sense to you? Have you ever puzzled over the instructions for how to put something like a bookshelf or grill together? When people don’t use words well, there are consequences that range from mild annoyance to legal actions. When people do use words well, they can be inspiring and make us better people.  

So: how can you enliven your writing? How can you take a laundry list of, say, the three major school events your kid was involved in and turn them into enchanting, or vivid, or funny, or slightly dreamy stories for your holiday mailing list recipients?

Mythcreants is, according to its website, “An online publication for speculative fiction storytellers.” What, you mean like fantasy and sci-fi? But I don’t even like that stuff, I hear you bleating. Why would I want to write like it?  You don’t have to. But, along with sports writing, this subset consistently offers some of the best writing you’ll find out there. Which doesn’t mean you have to read it; I’m just saying.

The site in question offers solid, pragmatic advice for all writers, from letter-writers to aspiring novelists to people writing potluck invites. Included is a list of things to aim for.

• Use Specific Terms
(“An “inchworm” is more evocative than a “caterpillar” and definitely more evocative than a “bug.”)
—So maybe: “A jubilant inchworm welcomed me to my first return to the garden last March.”

• Show as Much as Practical
(Replace named emotions with body language. Instead of saying a character looks “surprised,” say “their eyes widened” or “her brows lifted.”)
—So, for instance: “our 5-year-old’s eyes doubled in size when he opened his first Christmas gift.”

• Use Active Verbs
(Instead of “There were two couches in the room,” write, “Two couches faced each other across the room.”)

—You’ve heard me natter about this one before. Note, for example, in the above garden example: That earthworm wasn’t just lying around. (There was already an earthworm in my garden in early March.) That green, glistening baby greeted you.

Additional great items in this site’s long list:

• Include movement (animals can skitter, lights might flicker, sinks might drip);
• Go beyond visuals (invoke the other senses).

See? Not a goblin or extra-terrestrial in sight. Check it out.

Sports articles are crisp, terse, full of action—not surprising, given their topic. The verbs are robust; descriptions that rely on adjectives are lean or nonexistent. The story starts in the middle, right before the thing you’re dying to find out.

Read this interesting reflection on good sports writing from Nieman Storyboard, a publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. It references the 2023 closing of the New York Times sports section, about which a Washington Post writer reflected more broadly on the good writing to be found in the sports sections of  many prominent newspapers, including his beloved Boston Globe, which he writes, “was a master class in how to cover athletes and coaches, how to re-create games that ended past bedtime, how to tell stories big and small, how to do the job. The athletes weren’t my heroes. The writers who covered the athletes were my heroes.”

I’m not a fan of reading scripts for plays or movies. Those art forms are created to watch, to participate in viscerally as part of a shared experience, not to sit in a chair and read. I particularly dislike stage directions.

But in his website “promoting writing excellence,” Stavros Halvatzis quotes the stage directions that open the first episode of the phenomenally successful TV series Stranger Things:

We FADE UP on the night sky. Dark clouds swallow the stars.
We hear a LOW-END RUMBLE. It sounds almost like thunder, only it is somehow more alive. Like the growl of an unseen beast. We TILT DOWN to find…

Halvatzis ruminates on the above:

In the scene above the descriptive language adds to the mood and setting. Words such ‘rumble’, ‘thunder’ and ‘growl’ lend a sense of menace, as does the simile of the ‘unseen beast.’ This is a powerful start to the episode—one that hooks us into the story from the get-go, primarily through the power of the language.

Again, will the record-breaking weather in your neck of the woods make it into the holiday letter this December? Maybe those “low-end rumbles” that warned you of the coming storm might find their way in. Or, who knows, maybe you caught your cat’s jaws “tilting down” toward the head of that poor bird just in time to snatch it away and save its life?

In an old column, the journalist-slash-writer Calvin Trillin described the talents of fellow journalist Russell Baker upon the occasion of Baker’s death.

He preferred the unadorned to the gussied-up. That was reflected in his comments on the tendency of Americans to write the sort of English that turned “use” into “utilize” and “do” into “implement.” He called it fat English. “Show them a lean, plain word that cuts to the bone,” he wrote, “and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon some poor threadbare sentence like a sack of iron on a swayback horse.”

Another take on great writing: surprise them. From Cotton Comes to Harlem:

Let’s split, Coffin Ed said. Jazz talks too much to me.
It ain’t so much what it says, Grave Digger agreed, it’s what you can’t do about it.

Here, author Chester Himes uses a noun (jazz) attached to a verb (talks) in an unlikely way. But this dialogue, plus that in the second half of this excerpt, surprises again, in a different way—by veering off from the direction you anticipated.

“Jazz talks ...”

Cool and surprising beginning (jazz usually sounds, a passive kind of thing for it to do; it doesn’t often talk, an aggressive action). But then you expect it to continue with something like, “Jazz talks to me soothingly.” Or “Jazz talks in a tight-lipped snarl.” Some such sentiment. But no: it “talks too much to me.” Wait. Is he dissing jazz?! And... is that even grammatical? Lots going on there.

And then the second speaker says, “It ain’t so much what it says,” and your little left brain finishes it for him: “...it’s how it makes you feel.” Or: “...it’s what it doesn’t say.” (That speaker wears a beret and holds his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, nodding in time to the bongo beat.)

But no; it isn’t so much what it says,  “...it’s what you can’t do about it.” He finishes with a different noun—you—turning back on jazz. (And seriously dissing it, by the way.)  

And that’s not even mentioning the fabulous character names.

A bunch of good writing (and reading) newsletters are in my SubStack neighborhood. (See Spark, “a free weekly newsletter that explores life through the lens of what we are reading and writing” and which includes a “resources” section; Auraist, offering its take on the best writing; or What Makes Great Writing, which is about, well, what makes great writing.)

I could go on and on, and probably will in future issues; Well Worded is, after all, the name of this newsletter. I’ll leave you today with a look at one more literary device: alliteration, one of the cheerier ones:

noun: alliteration; plural noun: alliterations
the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.
“the alliteration of “sweet birds sang” ”

See? Sweet singing birds—cheery, right?

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Lagniappe: Here’s a fun fact. Your brain is constantly eating itself. Its cells “envelop and consume smaller cells or molecules to remove them from the system.” But apparently, we’re not to worry—the process isn’t harmful and in fact helps preserve our brain. This fun fact comes from the BBC’s Science Focus.