December Tip Week--A Gift for Writers

Here you go! For the writer who has everything except the perfect adjective to describe someone's voice!

Once I saw this list, I realized I had been spinning my wheels trying to get the right word for my characters' voices. So, I'll unveil my character traits here:

• Dean Talley--taut
• Emmanuel Nunez--gravelly, gruff
• Rosemary Talley--brittle, honeyed (yep, same voice!)
• Samantha Smith--small, thin

I'm still thinking about about some of the others. 

Hey, it's fun to play with and, who knows, some of them might stick. Besides, it's only nine days till Christmas and this writer is ready to celebrate! 

Next Week: My Wish List! ;-)

chubby, plump, pudgy, tubby

What's the difference?

I've been working on the question of connotation since I described a person as "pudgy" and John vehemently disagreed. That started a discussion of the connotation of adjectives that equal fat. With my mother and several other people the list grew into the four adjectives in the title: chubby, plump, pudgy, tubby.

All of these are defined as "having excess body fat" in my thesaurus and readers are directed to to entry on fat. In my AMERICAN HERITAGE dictionary these words are used to define each other. Now my question is: Do you assign different amounts of excess body fat to these words? Is chubby cute? I.e. a chubby-checked baby, or plump pleasing as we say so often? It's all in your perception of the words...and your self-image if you're describing yourself. (Note to self--pleasingly plump sounds so much better than pudgy.)

All this matters when we describe characters for our readers. How do you decide which word to use? How do writers decide between two close words? We do it all the time and it does matter. Check out Your Brain on Fiction from THE NEW YORK TIMES. Our brains actually react to different words in different ways.

I posed this question to the writers on the Forum in a thread titled chubby, plump, pudgy, tubby and got a rollicking discussion of adjectives for overweight. Some of the words included were:


portly, stout, husky, zoftig, thick, barrel-chested, porcine, corpulent, thickset, heavyset, doughy, fleshly, thick-waisted, Rubenesque, cuddly, chunky

What was really interesting in the discussion was the age and gender assignments that went with the various adjectives.

So, how do you decide which adjective to use? Do you take connotation into consideration?

Lightning

"God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed."

~~Mark Twain

~~If you're as amazed by that quote as I am, you are looking at it and wondering just when on earth do you use adjectives? And adverbs for that matter. We've all heard the writing rule to cut adjectives and adverbs and "use stronger verbs and concise nouns." So I have a question for you--where do you get those stronger verbs and concise nouns? Is there a nifty little list we can consult or is it trial and error, learning by doing?

~~I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but sometimes I do find it hard to find the right word that makes the sentence say what I need it to say and cut to the bone of the topic at hand. Of course, Mark Twain has a quote for that, too.

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

~~So happy hunting, my fellow word sleuths. ; )