”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.” – Lewis Carroll

One of the things I didn’t understand when I started writing was the pliability of words. Oh, I knew that the way I phrased things was important. I could see when this way of putting something worked better than that way. But I was young and sure of myself, and it never occurred to me that the words themselves didn’t necessarily mean the same thing.

Then I went off to live in Minnesota, which our license plates proclaim as “the Land of 10,000 Lakes.” And at first I was a little puzzled by the exaggeration. OK, there were a few lakes, as I saw it, but nowhere near 10,000 of them. Most of the things they called “lakes” were, well, duck ponds – I could walk all the way around some of them in less than fifteen minutes.

It wasn’t until I visited a town out to the west, and heard folks seriously referring to a stream of water that was ten feet wide and two feet deep as a “river” that I realized that the problem wasn’t with other people’s definitions; it was with mine.

See, I grew up in Chicago and suburbs, and to me “lake” means something like Lake Michigan (or at least, something that takes a day or more to walk all the way around), and “river” means the Mississippi somewhere along the middle of its run, which is a heck of a lot wider and deeper than ten feet wide and two feet deep.

It took me even longer to realize that everybody does this … and to work through the implications of what that means for my writing. Basically, I can’t count on even the simplest words to say exactly what I mean to all my readers. They’ll say something comprehensible – we all agree that a lake is a body of water surrounded by land, something you can walk around – but the implications won’t necessarily be the ones I think I’m providing.

Some writers, when they realize this, try to micro-control their readers’ reactions by describing things in minute detail…and some readers really like this approach, even though it’s never quite as completely successful as the writers would like. Other writers describe as little as they can get away with, preferring to let the reader’s imagination fill things in. I’m somewhere in the middle, mostly (my current POV character is…rather selective in what she bothers to observe, which means the books are skewed toward the “no description at all” end of the spectrum).

The important thing, though, is not to get so attached to whatever picture you see in your own head that you expect or insist that all your readers end up looking at the same mental image. It will only frustrate you. Writing is not telepathy, only a murky approximation of the same.

What units am I talking about? Starting small and working up: letters, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, sections, books, multi-book story arcs.

Most of the time, creative writing advice focuses on things that matter at the middle levels: stuff like plot and characterization and setting that build up over the course of a scene or a chapter or a book. The assumption seems to be that everyone has already learned all they need to know about the words-to-paragraphs level of writing back in grade school, so that by the time people get to the point of trying to write a novel, they can jump right in learning about scenes and chapters and plot skeletons and so on.

Now, what I learned from Sr. Agnes and Sr. Winifred back in grade school was essential and invaluable, and I got a long way on just those basic rules of grammar, syntax, etc. Eventually, though, I came to a point where those basics weren’t enough. I knew how to build letters into words and words into phrases and phrases into clauses and so on, but I wanted more. I didn’t just want to build large, square Lego houses. I wanted to build Lego dinosaurs and airplanes and astronauts. And to do that, I needed to understand more than just how to snap one block into the next. I needed to know how and why they fit together, starting from the smallest units.

Yes, from the smallest. Most people don’t even think about letters; they’re just sort of there. They string together to make words, but as long as you run the spelling checker and aren’t making up your own language, you’re probably right.

Yet letters have the first key property of all these building blocks that’s important to writers: sound. It’s predefined, and the only way the writer can control it is by choosing words carefully, yet the sound of a word can be just as important as what it means. Words with gutteral or harsh sounds give things an unpleasant feel; they’re a good way to add a creepy undertone to a description or a conversation without being too obvious. More smooth, liquid sounds, like oo’s and l’s, tend to make things flow peacefully.

Sound provides all sorts of tools, from alliteration to puns to rhyme. And sound gets really important when it comes to dialog. You don’t want to give your characters impossible tongue-twisters to yell in mid-battle, or hand a talking snake a line like “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” “She sells sea shells,” on the other hand, would fit a snake just fine…if the snake has a thing for alliterative tongue-twisters.

Some people are extremely sensitive to the sound of words, even when they are reading silently; others only notice the sounds if someone is reading the story aloud. Writers who fall into the second category need to remember that there are plenty of sound-sensitive readers out there, and do occasional checks (reading aloud) to make sure they haven’t chosen words that don’t sound right for the situation, or that don’t fit together properly.

You have probably noticed that I’m talking mainly about the sounds of words, even though I’m supposed to be talking about letters. This is going to happen a lot in this series of posts, because many of the key properties of a particular unit of fiction only become useful to writers at the next level up, when you start snapping the Lego pieces together. You can’t change the sound a particular letter is supposed to make, or the standard spelling of a word, but you can choose words with an eye to their sound, as well as their meanings.

Which brings us to words.

What you do with words is, you build phrases, clauses, fragments, sentences, etc. Most people do this more or less instinctively, once they’ve learned to talk, but the real nitty-gritty of how writing works starts with words, with how they work, with how they relate to each other, and, later on, with the different effects you can get because of the different properties they have.

The very first key property of words is one that most writers have heard over and over: specificity. Specific, concrete words nearly always have more impact and are more effective  at conjuring up an image than abstract words or general words. A “flaming sunset” has more impact than a “beautiful sunset;” a “brown car” has less impact than “a brown Lexus” or even “a brown convertible;” “he went away quickly” is less evocative than “he fled.” This doesn’t mean a writer can/should never use abstract words like “beautiful” or generic ones like “car;” only that if one does, one should probably examine them to see whether the “low impact” effect is what the writer really wants (and, if not, whether there’s a less abstract, more specific word that will do the job instead.)

Next up: more about words, with specific reference to parts of speech.