words words words

I’ve spent a lot of time lately deciding the importance of words. How significant is this sentence to the plot? Can I live without these seven paragraphs? Will it take anything away from the overall story? I’m struggling. Really struggling to figure out how to eliminate thousands of words.

Now I’m literally going word by word. I don’t really… really… need to describe the action of speaking every other sentence of conversation. The actor/director in me wants to explain nuance. But I know from my own reading that I just want to know what the character is saying. I don’t need to know how many breaths or flutters of the eyelids are in between each paragraph. Every single word is going under the microscope.

I’ve gotten some great feedback from my readers. Many of them have nice things to say about my style. It is something with which I have silently prided myself over the years. Even over emails. Or random blogs. I like my rhythm. Do I destroy it when I concentrate too minutely on words? No. I concentrate on words I write all the time. Even an email. Seriously. Or this. I really want the words to sound right together. To swim.

But each word is significant. It is significant to that little counter at the bottom of my left hand screen. It’s significant to the overall theme. I can’t toss them away lightly. I can’t drown in them.

I’ve never misunderstood the power of words. Hell, I even remember that from my dogmatic instruction. Jesus was the word made flesh. And that word was pretty damn powerful when you consider how literally a lot of people take it.

Isn’t it curious then that people spew their thoughts so carelessly? We all do. Lord knows I’ve had my moments of verbal diarrhea. Especially when I leave a phone message… or try to communicate anything on a phone for that matter. I’m not very good speaking my thoughts right away. In emotional confrontations. And even, I found out last summer, as a director trying to describe a vision. If I don’t have the power to edit, I say too much… or not enough. I don’t really contemplate the power of the words that express what I’m thinking.

But I’m learning this year that mulling and waiting to find the right thing to say will lose the moment. I am trying to shirk off the hesitation to express delight or appreciation for someone or something someone does to make me smile. Appreciation isn’t spoken loudly enough or often. Love is taken for granted and not put into words as much as it can be. Words that don’t need to be analyzed and put under a microscope when the heart that expresses them is sincere.

But somehow… I don’t think that argument is going to work for me in a query. Pleh.