Editing is not everyone’s favorite, but I happen to enjoy editing, which is good because the majority of my writing time in the past year has been spent editing. To me, editing is like a jigsaw puzzle or one of those little plastic slide puzzles where you have to get all the squares in the correct place. Editing is similar – you want to make the overall picture clear, but to do so, you need each individual piece in the correct place. These “pieces” could be plot points, characters, or – the one I’ve been thinking about recently – word choice.
Finding the right word(s) to describe a scene or a character or convey a thought or action can be frustrating and time consuming, but it is immensely satisfying when the right word clicks into place and makes the sentence you’ve been working on sing.
There are so many things that go into making the right word choice. Have I used that word somewhere else in the surrounding sentences? Does it evoke the correct time period/setting? What does that word convey to my readers about the character? Does the word sound right? Does that word actually mean what I think it does?
If you’re curious how this works – at least in my brain – the rest of this entry will dissect three instances from my upcoming novel Worthy of Trust where I spent time trying to find the right word.
To give you some context, Worthy of Trust (spoiler alert) opens with a mob scene and then jumps to the aftermath of the first day of Revolutionary War, and all three of these instances come from these two scenes.
The opening mob scene takes place in the winter, and one of my lines originally read, “Anger was falling faster than snow.” I liked this because of the alliteration, but my editor pointed out that this could be interpreted as the anger was decreasing while just the opposite was actually happening – something I hadn’t considered in the who-knows-how-many times I had read this section. She suggested using “piling up” (Anger was piling up faster than falling snow OR Anger was piling up like falling snow), but when I read the line with that word change, it just didn’t sound quite right. I’m fairly certain I sat with this line for ten or fifteen minutes – yes, or maybe longer; this line was really bothering me – trying to find the right word and structure for the line. When I am working on word choice, I use a thesaurus because I have found my brain only likes to generate the same words over and over again. I have started using the thesaurus WordHippo, which I was shown by my friend Eric, because it not only gives synonyms for individual words but common phrases and sayings as well. When trying to replace “falling” didn’t work, I searched for synonyms for “piling up” and found the word “mount.” The puzzle piece fit; using “mounting” both the anger and the snow were accumulating in my sentence: “Anger was mounting faster than the falling snow.”
A few pages later, my main character, Whitley, pulls a note from her pocket, an important note. Having just spent hours in surgery, she attempts to clean off her hands before taking out the note. Originally, I had “I wiped off what blood I could before taking the scrap of paper from my pocket though I had its brief contents memorized.” When I read this aloud (yes, I always do at least one read-through of my edited work aloud because I notice things differently when I hear them and don’t just see them), I felt this was too clunky. The poet in me didn’t like flow, and it took too long for the reader to get to what was important¾reading the note. Was there a way to convey that Whitley had read this note many times over the past four days? How would this note look after much handling? I played around with what word I could use to describe this note, and I finally decided on “tattered” and to get rid of the dependent clause at the end of the sentence. “Tattered” gave tactile feeling to the note, implied that Whitley had handled the note frequently, and sped up the line: “I wiped off what blood I could before taking a tattered scrap of paper from my pocket.”
Having lived through the trauma of the aftermath of the battles of Lexington and Menotomy, Whitley faces a barrage of memories which she buried in order to make it through the day. My original line read, “The memories came now, faster than musket balls.” The word “now” had to go (for different reasons), which meant I needed to restructure the line. How could I make the reader feel the impact of those memories? Whitley is essentially under attack from her own mind and having just spent 12+ hours in a battle zone, so war imagery made sense¾and would tie into time period. I was already comparing the memories to musket balls, so in this instance it was a matter of extending the simile (which always makes me happy). What do musket balls do? They strike. Final line: “The memories struck, faster than musket balls.”
There you have it, a peek into my editing brain.