Words Matter
Everyone has heard the adage, “sticks and stones may break my bone, but words will never hurt me”. This phrase will ruin you. It is a saying propagated by the same people who convinced you the Tooth Fairy is philanthropic instead of a pedophilic spirit with a fetish for enamel, but hey, at least she pays. Throw a cover on it and stow it away in the dark recesses of your brain with that memory of the time your bladder control failed you in the middle of your 3rd grade math class.
Words matter. Actions may speak louder, but words have a permanence that transcends our biomechanical structure. “We have to let you go.” “Mom is dead.” “Congratulations, it’s a girl.” Words are the wings that can lift you ten thousand feet off the ground, but they can also eviscerate you in a matter of seconds. Words can drop you to your knees faster than the sweep of a leg. They can accelerate your heart and dump enormous amounts of cortisol into your circulatory system to the point where your body physically changes.
As a result, sloppy verbiage, both written and oral will not cut it in life, or in creative writing. Don’t simply tell a girl, “I love you.” Explain to her how the curvature of her spine on the small of her back slots perfectly with your hand like a puzzle piece. Tell her that it is her name echoed in the silence between beats of your heart. Let her know that she is the beam of light from the lighthouse slicing through the fog in your brain. When you mess up -- and you undoubtedly will in spectacular fashion -- do not say, “I’m sorry.” Tell the person you hurt that there is a roiling ocean inside of you, and the guilt-laden anchor is threatening to drag your dingy below the waves. Show them that you will do anything and everything in your power to rectify the situation, and stress just how much anguish is compressing your chest like a vine over what you have done.
I am not advocating that you run to the nearest Thesaurus and produce elegant words to drum up your sentences, everybody can see right through that. Writing is not an exercise in intellectual masturbation. Instead read everything in sight. Go out and have experiences and conversations with people. Learn. Understand sentence structure, and know how to vary it to keep your reader engaged. With every word, advance your point, even if it is just an inch. And by god, do not timidly step from one sentence to the next. Have confidence because you chose these words, and now they are your own.
Detail is important, but do not mistake that for verbosity. Add enough detail to stoke the imaginative fire in your reader’s brain, but not too much that they cannot keep track. “The giant, amber behemoth of a canine had incessant, bubbly, toe curling slobber bursting from his oral cavity like a flak gun firing at the rustic German spitfire planes in a World War II aerial skirmish” is just as unreadable as “The dog drooled a lot”. That said; never settle for “sad” when “morose” will elicit a stronger emotion. Give the reader the clearest lines and numbers you can, and they will paint the picture in themselves.
The words you don’t choose will also echo, even if it is subconsciously, in the readers mind. Make sure every critical word is precisely what you intend it to be. Revision is a constant process through which you rip away parts of yourself from your work, and it will be painful. Much like building muscle, revision is the resistance through which your paper’s muscles will shred and regrow to become stronger than before.
Words matter. Regardless of how mundane the conversation or monotonous the email, your words are a snapshot of who you are as a person, and sometimes that picture can last forever. So choose your words carefully, everyone is listening.