Lear: Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever.
She’s dead as earth….
More Shakespeare, more King Lear.
This time it’s Lear’s entrance line, in the play’s final scene. He appears, carrying his daughter Cordelia’s lifeless body in his arms, and he’s clearly gone out of his mind.
The language is bone-simple. Yes, metaphor and image are present, but notice that, with the exception of “heaven’s” and “ever,” Shakespeare uses not a single word of more than one syllable.
I’ve sometimes surprised a class of beginning fiction writers by challenging them to write an entire story using only one-syllable words. Their first reaction is invariably, “it can’t be done.” Then, after they’ve done it, nearly always, it’s, “wow, not only did I do it, but my writing seems unusually strong.”
Lesson: the more syllables you pile on, the weaker your writing becomes.
Or to put it positively: the fewer the syllables, the better the writing. I’ll play around with Lear’s speech to show you what I mean: Lear (as mangled by Bill): O, consternating Fate! Uncaring ones!
If I, like you, could visualize the situation,
I”d guarantee to crack the heavenly gates… etc.
Ugh. Aside from the fact that I’m no Shakespeare, what really weighs the speech down is the use of 3 and 4 syllable words like consternating, visualize, situation, guarantee.
What is it with multiple syllables? Why are they such a drag?
Here’s why:
• When we build extra syllables on top of basic one or two-syllable root words, we are loading them not for the purpose of stronger story-telling, but for dispassionate professional or official use.
• The extra syllables pile up extra layers of meaning, but without adding much value. For instance, ”visual” is a simple, clear, descriptive modifier. By contrast, ”visualization” means the state, or act, of having made visual–that is, a thing whose existence is abstract. The added dimensions of meaning are all represented by suffixes alone. That imagery is not expanded. And with each added suffix, the word becomes less experiential, more dispassionate and more beaurocratic. No value is added.
Running up the number of visits, we tend to serve purposes more technical than passionate.
By contrast, what happens when we are extremely upset? In English, we stop using the fancier polysyllabic “nicer” words we inherited from the Norman French, and instead drop down to our most basic, unadorned Anglo-Saxon.
Bill Clinton: I did not have sex with that woman! You can almost hear his clenched teeth.
So, then, naturally fluent writers take heed: your nimbleness with cascading syllables, so impressive to pure language buffs, can actually distract you from your primary job as a novelist–to deliver the dramatic moment most powerfully.
Too much language–even by a phrase or two, four or five words instead of one or two, use of polysyllabic “officialese,” or extra metaphors crammed in because they’re so…so awesome–any of these can act as a barrier to releasing the emotion inside the moment.
No emotion, no drama. No drama, no reader interest. And suddenly, because we couldn’t resist showing how deftly we could wield language of high elegance and complexity, our story–which is the whole point, after all–is dead in the water.
Here’s the takeaway:
Emotion, not language, is the jet fuel of fiction.
More on that tomorrow, in the final part of this series.
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