Word

Can you get every word right in a whole damn book?

Can you?

Of course you can uphold standards of precision, clarity, and accuracy in a sentence. Or a page. Or a poem. Or a piece of flash fiction if there’s a $1,000 prize involved. Or a speech at a wedding. Or a cover letter for the perfect job.

In those cases, you pore over every word.

Yes, pore.

(The phrase pore over comes from a little-used sense of the verb pore: to meditate deeply. Can you imagine if all of us writers meditated over every word? Pour over is also a legitimate phrase, but it’s what you do with milk and a bowl of cereal.)

I’m fascinated by editors who have the discipline to never let their standards sag.

I’ll never forget reading a profile of writer Lydia Davis in The New Yorker. She said that a little bell goes off in her head when a piece of writing isn’t precisely right. Here’s one sentence she cited as an example:

A paper bag stuffed with empty wine bottles.

The problem, she pointed out, is that stuffed is a verb that comes from material. Material is soft, so it’s a problem to use stuff when referring to something hard.

That’s a little thing, right? You might find that sentence to be fine. But is it perfect? It’s an example of the kind of imprecision, of something being a bit off, that might add up if page after page of storytelling is allowed to drift.

Maybe your readers will sense something casual or loose about your story if you have too many such words. Maybe they will start to drift.

I’ve previously sung the praises of Visual Thesaurus. This online tool shows you options for words in clusters. Those suggested alternates might include a more precise word than the one you first conjured up.

And now there is a new online etymology dictionary.

As the website says, it’s a “map of the wheel-ruts of modern English.” Not definitions, but “explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.” You are looking into that word’s DNA. Its heritage.

Whenever I need to see my words more clearly, I’ll plug one into Visual Thesaurus or the etymology search engine to see if there is an embedded idea behind the word that might help with what I’m trying to say.

Words are our building blocks, our bricks. Yes? Every one matters, or should. Yes? In a perfect world, wouldn’t we pick up each word and hold it in our hands, admire it, study it, and pore over it before laying it down in a sentence?

You can maintain high standards for one sentence or one paragraph. So, certainly you can do it for a whole novel.

Right?

Or do you let your standards slip? Do you imagine your readers with a fat hook in their collective cheeks given the high drama and incredible stakes in your tightly plotted yarn, the hook set so firmly that you don’t need to really care about the words flying from your keyboard?

When in doubt, pluck that word out of your story. Look under its hood. Kick its tires. What ruts has it left behind in its long history?

Find out what gives that word its power, and give your story all the precision it deserves.