I love writing about my home state of Michigan. Although I’m
new at writing fiction, I’ve been very consciously trying to place my writing
in the places I know best. As far as I’m concerned, it’s some of the most
amazing scenery this country has to offer, and I’m proud to call myself a
Michigan writer.
True though that may be, I find one of my biggest challenges
as a Michigan writer to be word choice. Now, don’t misunderstand me; I’m great
at using a thesaurus judiciously and have a vast vocabulary (just ask my dad
who spent years trying to make me talk a little less). My problem lies in
trying to come up with original ways to describe the things I love best about
my state—namely the weather these days.
The old joke used to be that Eskimos had a thousand (or
whatever number your version of the saying included) words for snow. Well, I
wish I had that kind of vocabulary when trying to describe the different ways
the snow has appeared outside my office window just this winter alone. Right now,
for example, there’s a fine but persistent snow coming down, making the sky
appear more gray than clear. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a word for that
kind of snow—something like “smist”? I’d
also take a great new word for the kind of snow that comes down in big feathery
flakes, twisting and twirling on the wind—maybe “sheathery” would work for
that. Then I could just write, “What had begun as a sheathery afternoon soon
turned smisty” and dig on into the plot of my story. Instead, I have to puzzle
over words, searching for the perfect accretion of adjectives to convey just
the right atmosphere. Words can be so confining!
Or can they be? As any who have suffered through a high
school English class might remember, Shakespeare had a knack for inventing new
words. Scholars pore over his works, marveling at the ways he changed
grammatical structures, added prefixes or suffixes where they hadn’t been before,
and even created words no one had ever used before. Did you know, for example,
that Shakespeare created the word “friended”
long before Facebook made it popular? And I think Shakespeare may have met my
husband a time or two before he crafted the word “forgetive.”
Similarly, who can question the preeminent word creator Dr.Seuss’s use of words like “zizzer-zazzer-zuzz”
and “fiffer-feffer-feff”? Where would the world be if we didn’t have the lorax
and the grinch? Seuss certainly never let words constrain him.
Perhaps the lesson here is that if the sky is looking
smisty, then that’s what I need to write. I’m not Shakespeare or Seuss (or
Geisel either), but I know my setting better than anyone else. If I own the
word, maybe someday my readers will be looking up at the sky remarking on the
lovely sheathery snow.
What are your favorite new words from things you’ve read or
written? What is your greatest challenge when it comes to word choice?
