Tuesday, March 28, 2017

When Just Any Word Won't Do

I spent the majority of my thirty minutes of fiction time working on three paragraphs, trying to play with the right combination of words that conveyed the rainy scene and the emotions in an unspoken communication between two people about to enter a "situation."

The scene I see in my head and the feelings it should invoke: how to create that bridge from my mind to the readers?

I played with words, rearranged them, cut them, and brought some back, jostling them around. "Show" is more than sentences with strong action words and light on the adjectives. It's finding the right mix of vocabulary and varying the sentence structure. It's attempting to create a visual, a mood.

I'm not quite there yet, but I'm closer. Amazing how a handful of words can absorb so much time.

1 comment:

Tom Hernandez said...

Yep. I do that too. Spend an eternity to find "just the right words", only to then futz with them endlessly. At some point I force myself to stop. Over-editing can be worse than not editing at all.