It all started like this… 

See… I was doing some housecleaning.  Seriously.  OLD housecleaning.  Pre-kids housecleaning.  Uhm, sacred drawer of intimacy housecleaning.  Yeah.  That sort of housecleaning.  Anyway-- I threw "stuff" away, like you do, and looked across the street.

Now, we live across the street from a church with a little private school attached.  The faith is uberconservative, but the people there are very nice.  When Big T started school, he, of course, went with whatever special ed program available-- the bus came and got him and then brought him home.  WhenChicken started school, our district had not yet started open enrollment, and our neighborhood sucks.  We didn't want to put her on a school bus to be taken to a crappy school.  You had to see her, too-- I don't have any pictures on the computer from that time, but, well… she was tiny.  She had a growth spurt in her Freshman year, but for the longest time, she was shorter than average, tinier than average, and she had the tiniest, most piquant little heart shaped face, dominated with big brown eyes. I couldn't send my baby away!  But I had a job, too.  So we sent her across the street, to the nice women who always wore dresses and never cut their hair.

Of course, there were some drawbacks.  For one, they didn't let the kids read about magic, and that's where I live.  Seriously-- no Harry Potter.  No C.S. Lewis.  Nothing but watered down bible stories and stock curriculum.  For another, most of their teachers barely had a BA degree.  Now, for the littler kids that doesn't matter particularly-- if you are good with little kids and you have a curriculum, you're doing your job.  But as Chicken grew, we were doing more of the teaching at home--value-wise, too, because these weren't our people.  We had run ins with teachers who wouldn't let her go to the bathroom until it was too late (because it was a CHURCH school, and you had to be DISCIPLINED) and run-ins with teachers who didn't believe that she was really trying in penmanship (in which she got a grade, believe it or not.)  I had to go in there and physically write something to show the teacher that A. She came by it rightly, and B. We didn't really give a shit how good her penmanship was, it didn't indicate how smart she was.  By the fourth grade, we'd had enough church school, and the district had opened up anyway, so we sent her to the local school for a year, and then to T's school for a blissful, two-year period wherein they both attended the same middle school.  

Anyway-- so I know the church school across the street.  

And there I was, looking at the kids playing in the brown field (like us, they let their lawn die during this horrible, hot, dry, winter) and throwing away, uhm, unmentionable items.  

*giggle*

Oh gees. These people freak out over Harry Potter.  What would they do if someone knocked over my trash-can full of vibrators?

*giggle*

I came back in and got on the computer (where I live and breathe) and Tweeted/FB'd that very sentiment:  "Just threw away old "unmentionables".  We live across from a church--I hope nobody knocks over my trashcan."

And, like it does on social media, that little comment got seen.  By my publisher.  Who loved it.  Adored it.  

Asked me very prettily to write it.  Even put Mary-my-Mary on CC to talk me into shoving it in front of the queue.  

I really can't ever say no to Elizabeth, ever.  This was no exception.

Shiny! was written in good fun-- and nothing but.  There is a lot of me in there, if you know where to look, but it's the happy me, the philosophical me, the me that bounces back and doesn't wallow.  (Yeah, she's here!)  I sort of love Will, a big, doofy, good-willed everyman, who tries his best and takes his time and who is, in all his generous humility, a superstar to the people who love him.  I love Kenny too, snarky, sarcastic, a little bitter, but basically whole and sound, and so very willing to open up to Will's sweetness and drink it in.  There are no tragedies int his one.  No deep  dark secrets.  No hidden wellspring of epic pain.  I'll ask my angst-whores to be patient-- Blackbird and Beneath the Stain will rip their hearts out, but Shiny! is just that.  Happy.  Shiny.  Sweet.  

I hope you all enjoy a little bit of sunshine, at the end of what has been (for some of you) a long, bleak winter.

Can Note

 

By

 

Amy Lane

 

The thing to remember about word choice is that words have layers, accretions of time and history stacked upon them, like colors made mixed (combined, swirled, distorted) with a palette knife and hand-mixed oil/mineral paints. A tiny bit (smidgen, dash, soupcon) too much tint, and the picture goes murky (dark, black, inky) as a politician’s soul (pitch, night, an old whore’s heart, an preacher’s conscience). 

A tiny bit too much tint (brightness, light) and the picture (portrait, landscape, study) blinds us with optimism.  As my daughter (spawn, offspring, child, kid, immediate female descendent) says, “Mom, if you made us look any better in print, people would think we crapped (shit, farted, expelled) rainbows and burped (barfed, belched, regurgitated) daisies.  She is right—although my spawn do shit rainbows and burp daisies—her point remains: every word, every detail helps to build a complete picture of plot, setting, character and theme.

***

I have always had a love affair with language.

When I was in fourth grade I was mocked by my peers for telling my teacher that I had a more “specific” answer.

When I was in high school, when we were asked to write sentences with our fifteen vocabulary words for the week, I strung my sentences together into a story.

When I taught high school, we would review the student’s vocabulary lists every week, and I knew word, definition, part of speech, a host of synonyms, and context from memory—and, more importantly, from instinct. 

I became words.

But until I sat down every day to write, and to write more, I don’t think I mastered them.

For one thing, that whole “less is more” idea didn’t even (permeate, penetrate, seep) into my consciousness until I had a deadline and a specific idea that I had (was obligated, was challenged, was forced) to get across in 20K or less.  For another, the idea of “genre” fiction hadn’t quite penetrated.  It is important that we don’t let prose suffer in genre fiction, it’s true—but falling in love with our own prose is not nearly as conducive to good storytelling as falling in love with our own characters. 

I’m lucky—I had an excellent travel guide through the wooly paths of the English language.  Six years of teaching George Orwell’s essay, “Politics of the English Language” made me aware of the pitfalls of using the AP English student’s vocabulary list as a map to the fantastical (amazing, gorgeous, orgasmic) land of perfect illustrative word choices.  Thanks to Orwell—and I knew that essay almost by heart for a while—I was able to avoid using every fifty-cent word I possibly could, when a dime’s worth of verbiage would do.  But it was more than that.

Years of interpreting works written by true masters of the English language made me aware of the difference in word choices, not just the simplest of word choices.  Would I rather my alien landscape be “hot and dry”, “oppressive and sterile”, or “scorching and barren”?  Each choice is like a different trail for the reader’s thought process to take.  If I pick “hot and dry”, the words are so common that my reader will automatically look for another emphasis.  There is no room for other interpretation, some other plot device must provide conflict.  Who can focus on “hot and dry?” 

If I choose “oppressive and sterile” I’ve implied not only an outside force in the word “oppressive”, but almost a moral judgment in “sterile”.  I’d use “oppressive and sterile” if there was a government conflict, or some sort of alien force to fight, or if the narrator needs to fight his or her own prejudices against the new environment. Those two words have already done part of my plot and thematic work for me, just by describing the landscape. 

But what if I used “scorching and barren”?  Those are very sensory specific words.  “Scorching and barren” describes the strip of I-5 between Bakersfield and the Grapevine—no political conflict, no underlying plot, just sheer, stinking inhospitable land.  Those words emphasize a conflict of environment only.

And so on. 

The official word for this sort of differentiation (discernment, implication) is “connotation vs. denotation”—and when I was teaching, I spent all year weaving this idea through vocabulary lessons, literature interpretation, and writing workshops.  The difference between connotation and denotation is as important as the difference between “anti-personnel device” and “bomb”. 

Denotation is the specific, exact dictionary meaning of a word.  Connotation is what the word means to our ears and our hearts.

Connotation and denotation are the difference between “sensual”, “erotic”, and “kinky.  They’re the difference between “erotica” and “porn”.  They’re the difference between “weird” and “unique”, between “old-fashioned” and “antiquated”, between “clueless” and “oblivious”. 

Connotation and denotation are the simple distinction between what things mean intellectually (denote), and what they mean emotionally, (connote).  The difference between these meanings in a word can destroy a work. 

Hell, they can start a war.

Think I’m kidding?

I grew up in a town with a population that was over 50% Mormon.  Those kids were my friends, my peers, my playmates.  One day, in a discussion with my grandmother, she called the Mormon religion a “cult”.  When I protested, she said, “Look it up. In the dictionary, a ‘cult’ is a religion that’s been around less than two-hundred years.”  Sure enough, our version of Merriam-Webster had a definition very close to that. 

I didn’t have the words connotation or denotation in my arsenal (my education was small-town at best) but I did know that you couldn’t do that.  I remember, very clearly, saying, “Grandma, that’s not what people are going to hear when you use that word.  There’s a power to words like ‘cult’ that you can’t find in the dictionary.”

She didn’t believe me of course, and I stalked off, pissed and irritated (which, for the record, is the way I get around my stepmom a lot too—I do not have good karma in store for me when I’m older) but also convinced I was right.  Then I became an English teacher, and God gave me the magic (mystical, enchanting, powerful, power-filled, otherworldly, alchemical) words:  Connotation and denotation.

Word choice.

The gut feeling that all writers need to inform them on choosing the colors for their word pictures wisely.