Diction

Hi everyone,

Today, I continued to write to my obstacles in the scene. I wrote to obstacle 2 and 3. Three is a turning point in the scene. It causes a crisis for my MC, so I stopped there to give it enough time tomorrow to do it justice.

What I also did while writing—and I realise I’ve been doing this each day—was taking time to choose specific atmospheric or subtext words based on the atmosphere I’ve written down in my scene plan: eg decaying, grim, gloomy.

I don’t care about diction in my first draft at all. But I noticed today that I was lingering on some sentences, putting in specific words to bring across the underlying feelings of my MC, the mood or tone of the scene and the atmosphere. After I ran out of appropriate words swimming around in my head, I found myself writing a list of words that are associated with the tone/atmosphere I wanted to convey. I realised I do this a lot, so I thought I should mention it here.

For example, I wanted to convey a more sombre, solemn tone of death and destruction. I googled synonyms of lots of words to do with these two concepts and put them in a list. While writing, I scanned the page of words to see if there were any that fitted what I was writing. Here is a sample of my list:

Destruction

Battered, shattered, splintered, desolate, crumble, barren, obliterated, razed, ruin, havoc, wreck, collapse, annihilated.

Death

Mourn, bleed, bury, withered, graveyard, moan, lament, anguish, ghost, grim, haunted, coffin, corpse, skeleton.

My actual list is much, much longer. But you get the idea.

So if I describe the wind, I’ll say: ‘the wind moaned through the trees’ or ‘skeletal branches battered the windowpane.’

To describe the lighting I might say: ‘the sun bled through the clouds.’

To describe sounds I might use: ‘the crash shattered the silence.’

You can do this at the end of revision, during the page level revisions but I also do it here. Diction isn’t something you work on once, I think it’s an ongoing process and words strike you during each phase of revision but I’ve found that making a list helps to avoid using the same word set over and over which is very easy to do.

To illustrate this further, let’s say I wanted a happy, fun, excited atmosphere, then my list of atmosphere/tone/mood words might look like this:

Excited:

Exuberant, lively, vibrant, gleeful, merry, spirited, dazzling, enchanting, playful, eager, whistle, dancing.

Then I’d change my words from the examples above accordingly.

‘The wind whistled through the trees’, ‘the sun played hide and seek with the clouds’, ‘exuberant voices burst the heavy silence’, ‘dancing branches tapped against the windowpane.’

Not great writing but you get the idea.

I’ll sign off now.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about turning points. See you then.

Happy writing,

Joanne.