Words I (Almost) Never Use

In this blog I’d like to discuss words that are overly literary, or too poetic, self-consciously artistic, or dogmatic in tone. These are words I’ve heard too many times in creative writing. They’ve been used so often they no longer have much impact. Here are some examples:

abyss

angel/angelic

awareness

beauty/beautiful

being

butterfly

calm

caress

consciousness

crystal

dawn

diamond

ecstasy

eternity/eternal

flower

glisten

happy

harmony

infinity/infinite

meditate/meditative

mind
            nothingness

oppression

peace

people (as in, “the people”)

pretty

rainbow

raindrop/rainy
            silence

soft

sparkle

spiritual

storm/stormy

struggle

stunning

sunset

sunny

sweet

tranquillity

tremble

These words fall into several categories. One group concerns beauty, or things that are intrinsically beautiful, such as butterflies and crystals. Another group includes words that relate to spiritual awareness. One other category is words associated with political movements. Then there are words that describe weather.

All of these are terrific words. Most authors I know have written them at one time or another. It’s just that they’ve been used so many times that they have sunk into greeting-card, cliché language. They feel so tired they've already fallen asleep.

Since they are words for real and crucial things, how can we come up with expressions that function in a similar manner, but still surprise and delight the reader?

Get as close as possible to the actual experience you’re describing. Let’s say you’re writing about a sunrise after a rainstorm that led to a moment of transcendent awareness. What exactly did you see and experience? When you say “ecstasy,” what were you actually feeling? Where were the raindrops, and precisely what type of flower were they on? If raindrops were trembling on a leaf, could you push it farther and say they were “rattling” on the leaf? What colors were the clouds that you’ve never heard described before. Not “silver” but “white gold,“ for instance. Use your imagination to stretch the language as far as it can go and still connect with your reader.

If you’re talking about a shantytown, can you find details that are so specific that the oppression that produces that situation becomes painfully clear? That way the oppression doesn’t get obscured by a generalized word that could describe many different things.

Another way to rescue these overused words is to place them in an unexpected context or next to a word they don’t usually appear with. What about a “delicious crystal”? Or an “eternal alley cat”? Or an “elegant rain”? Or a “Monarch” instead of a “butterfly”?

I hope I don’t sound too cynical about these words for beauty, spiritual experiences, and political change. All those things are important, but it’s also crucial to strive toward freshness of language. Language must be continually recreated. Its respiration is vital to writers.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 2, How and Why to Avoid Clichés

As poetic as the muses may be, I’m afraid that there is no more cliché moment in literature than invoking the muse at the beginning of an epic poem: “Sing, oh, ye muse!” And writers should avoid cliché diction like athletes in training should shun cheese fries and chocolate chip cookie sundaes. Cliché language is the very opposite of what Muse Power brings to our writing, which is the spark of the unexpected but true.

When I’m editing my own writing, I try to do one reading of my work where I’m not thinking about anything except purging cliché diction. I’m not looking at the overall success of the structure, the characters of the story, the arc of the emotion or plot—I’m just marking every cliché expression. 

How do you spot cliché language in your work? Ask yourself if you’ve ever, even once, read this image, description, or phrase before. If you have, or even if you suspect you have, it’s probably cliché and already overly familiar to the reader.

Why is that a bad thing? Because it doesn’t really register the emotion or image you’re trying to get those words to carry. If you write to your beloved, “My heart burns with desire for you,” it conveys anything but passion, since it seems as though you’re just repeating someone else’s words.

So what do you do when you spot cliché language? View it as an opportunity to go back to the emotion or scene that moved you to put it into words. Re-experience it the way you did the first time. Gather the image or scene deep in your imagination and then live it and describe it again. Instead of “My heart burns with desire,” go back to the source—write “It scares me how beautiful you are,” or something that really gets to that edgy emotion that pushed you to write in the first place. Or take the language you used and bend, twist, stretch, compress, rip, mince, or sauté it. Bring the words back to life.

A thesaurus is often not useful in this regard. A thesaurus is only going to take you to a word on the same level as the one you chose. You want to take your language up to the next level when you are trying to edit out cliché expressions.

In my next blog, I’ll return to the subject of the muse to discuss how that idea can liberate writers to tap into the fountain of inspiration. 

Other recent posts about writing topics:Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer