Graphic by Peg Ihinger
A lot of writers have talked about the importance of choosing the “right word,” from Gustave Flaubert’s “le mot juste” to Mark Twain’s “the difference between the almost-right word and the right word…is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” We talk about this because it’s important. But why is it important? And what does “the right word” mean, anyway? How do you know it’s right?
Choosing the right word is important because words are what stories are made of. The particular word you pick can affect everything in a story: tone, pacing, clarity, voice, characterization, action, readability, and on and on. The words the writer chooses, and the way the writer uses them, give the reader immediate clues about genre, Heinlein’s “The door dilated.” being one of the better-known examples.
So picking the right word is important because of what the right word does that a different word can’t (or simply doesn’t) do. Which brings me to what “the right word” is.
I would contend that the right word is the one that does the best job of delivering whatever effect (or effects) the writer wants delivered at that moment in the story. “Lightning” is not a better word or phrase than “lightning bug.” That famous Twain quote wouldn’t be nearly as memorable if he’d said “…the difference between a glowworm and the lightning.” It needs both of those words for its dramatic contrast.
Which word is “the right word” therefore depends on what the writer is trying to do, beyond the basics of, say, “describe a night scene.” If the writer wants a peaceful summer night for a romantic encounter between the main characters, lightning bugs will probably be a lot more effective than lighting. If the writer wants a dramatic rescue in a thunderstorm, lightning is obviously the preferred choice.
Of course, the majority of the time, writers are doing several things at once. Because picking “the right word” can (and does) affect so many of those things (tone, pacing, etc.), this means that the writer often makes their decision based on which of those things they feel is the most important at the moment. If “lightning bug” picks up a recurring lightning theme that “glowworm” doesn’t, the writer may choose the three-syllable “lightning bug” over the two-syllable “glowworm,” even though “glowworm” makes the sentence scan better.
Context is also important. One doesn’t usually want to use words like “adulting,” “biohack,” or “binge-watching” in a historical novel set in the 1600s, or even one set in the 1950s—not unless the viewpoint character has time-traveled from the 21st century.
A lot of these decisions get made intuitively (though, speaking for myself, when I’m working with historical or alternate-universe settings, I often have to consciously stop and eliminate words that are too modern-day). One key indicator that there’s a word choice problem is the word that keeps changing back and forth between two options—today, the sentence says “glowworm,” tomorrow, it’ll change to “lightning bug,” next edit it’ll shift back to “glowworm.” That’s a signal that the writer has two different effects that are important here, and one word hits perfectly on one effect, while the other is perfect for the other effect. Once one realizes this, one can search for a third possible word or a rephrasing that will provide both effects, but if that fails, one can only grumpily decide which of the two effects is most important, and pick the word that provides that one, letting the other go.
Lots of writing advice recognizes all of this. The problem, from where I sit, is that the advice they give nearly always start with something about how much more vivid the imagery is if the sentence reads “The tiger stalked forward” rather than “The tiger walked forward.”
Which, again, is quite true (if the tiger is indeed stalking), but “more vivid imagery” is only one of the things the writer can do with words. Yet once one starts with “the right word can create more vivid imagery,” it’s a very short step to “the right word must create more vivid imagery.” And the rest of the advice underlines the must if most of the examples that follow continue to demonstrate “more vivid imagery,” even when they’re supposedly trying to be examples of “the right word” changing tone, or voice, or clarity, or characterization, or whatever.
I think this happens because vivid examples are more memorable, and “remember this advice” is the effect the advice-writer wants. So they give an example that replaces “said” in speech tags with “something more precise” like “caroled” or “stammered” or “bellowed,” without considering the effect that all those dramatic, vivid speech tags will have on the tone or the voice or the readability of a page of dialog (let alone the effect over an entire novel).
I have never seen a “right word” discussion or example that talks about “said” being the right word (though I have seen one or two discussions of dialog and speech tags that do, and a couple of “right word” discussions that finish up with an acknowledgment that the right word isn’t always the longest, most unusual, or most obscure bit of vocabulary).
Unfortunately, when most or all of the examples in an article show words like walk, red, say, and look being replaced by “right words” like prowl, crimson, pontificate, and glower, readers can easily get the impression that it’s drama that makes something the right word, and simple or “generic” words can’t ever be the right one.
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