Tell me everything
you see wrong with the paragraph that follows.
Joey skipped
backwards from the alien who canned his assault rifle with his right
involvement. Plop! Plop! Inferno illuminated the dim lane. Pain flared in
Joey’s pump while the warhead stuck his left shoulder.
How could anyone
write something so damn confusing? The culprits could only exist as a thesaurus
and a writer who trusts one. Or, to put it another way:
In what way might
somebody inscribe approximately so damn blurring? The felons could only survive
as a phrasebook and a critic who principal unique.
See the problem?
Writers often turn
to the hellish thesaurus when they repeatedly write the same word and want
desperately to adopt another one it its place.
Writers occasionally
turn to a thesaurus because they falsely believe it will make their work sound
more intellectual.
These writers fail
to grasp how much more powerful the word “home” compares to “habitation” or “Mother”
to “parental unit.”
You saw from the
above examples how off-the-mark a thesaurus’s examples land. Thesauruses
(especially online versions such as the one that accompanies Microsoft Word)
love to group together words that almost
mean the same thing.
Writers who
discover that they wrote the word “ran” a few times too often will replace it
with words that fail to fit. A bank robber shouldn’t “skip” from the police
(unless she or he serves as a peculiar robber).
A robber likewise
shouldn’t “trek” from the police. A lost cub scout shouldn’t “stroll” away from
a grizzly bear or “saunter” from a masked killer.
Thesauruses offer
bouquets of breaks to script the wicked words and thus deliver the sinful
opinions to your bibliophiles.
What should you
do, then, when you use the word “run” too often?
Consider the two
paragraphs that follow.
1) Joey ran down
the hall, ran smack into Tanya. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her along as he
ran. They ran faster and faster, while the barks of the dogs that ran after
them grew closer and closer.
2) Joey jogged
down the hall, darted smack into Tanya. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her
along as he fled. They escaped faster and faster, while the barks of the dogs
that chased after them grew closer and closer.
I honestly prefer
the former. Yes, the word “ran” feels repetitive, but the replacements for
“ran” still feel repetitive in the
latter. The second paragraph even reeks of desperation, the author’s struggles
to impress her or his readers.
We
already know that Joey runs. We don’t need the author to remind us. We don’t,
as readers, suspect that Joey halted simply because the author went an entire sentence
without the word “ran.”
Consider this
revision:
Joey ran down the
hall, smack into Tanya. He grabbed her wrist, pulled her along. They gained
speed, while the dogs that chased them grew closer.
Another set of
examples:
1) She loved him
with all her heart, loved him with her body and soul. She never loved anyone so
much. The love she felt swelled as a balloon within her love-filled heart.
2) She treasured
him with all her heart, longed for him with her body and soul. She never adored
anyone so much. The tenderness she felt swelled as a balloon within her
affection-filled heart.
I admit, foremost,
that an author should never tell her
or his reader how a character feels when she or he could show us. A demonstration, via body language perhaps, would serve
far better.
I again would
rather take the first paragraph than the second. However, the following example
seems better still.
She loved him with
all her heart, body, and soul. She never before felt this strange swell, like a
balloon within her chest.
Notice that the
word “love” only appeared once, as did “heart,” and yet we still conveyed this
character’s feelings without repetitive words or a single, desperate nosedive
into a thesaurus.
I most prefer this
example, though:
She helped him
crawl into bed. He released a sudden, wet cry, vomited across her chest, and
slumped. His weak legs shook. She guided him beneath his sheets and went to
fetch some towels. She cleaned him first, gazed into his eyes—dulled by the
chemotherapy. “I never liked that shirt anyway.”
Never tell us how
a character feels. Prove it.
I find that only
one excuse exists for the existence of the otherwise troublesome thesaurus.
Ever experience a word on the tip of your tongue, the perfect word for your
sentence, but you can’t think of it?
Think of a word
similar to it, look it up in the thesauruses, and hunt for the word you
actually want.
Thanks for reading.
Daughters of Darkwana received a sweet, succinct
review, which you can read here, http://www.thebookeaters.co.uk/daughters-of-darkwana-by-martin-wolt-jr/
Also,
the third book in my series, Diaries of
Darkwana, recently arrived on Kindle. You can find the entire series at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Darkwana&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3ADarkwana
An
inside look at my novels (such as Daughters of Darkwana, which you can now find on Kindle) at Darkwana.blogspot.com
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