Excellent Word Choice at Work, pt. 1

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From the course by Wesleyan University

Creative Writing: The Craft of Style

512 ratings

Wesleyan University

Creative Writing: The Craft of Style

512 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Creative Writing

Your style is as unique and distinctive as your face, your voice, except that you can choose it, you can can work on it, enhance it. In this course we will introduce aspiring writers to the art of putting pressure on written language. We will study the use of metaphor and imagery, and demonstrate how clarity, grace, and inventiveness in word choice are imperative to a story’s success. Writers will emerge with the revision skills essential to all writers of good stories and good prose.

From the lesson

Meaning, Sense, and Clarity

Here in the first module we focus on putting pressure on your words so that they mean what you intend. We balance abstraction with the need to make good sense. And we discuss the first and last stylistic difficulty of any prose writer, being clear.

Excellent Word Choice at Work, pt. 14:14

Excellent Word Choice at Work, pt. 22:32

Meet the Instructors

Salvatore Scibona
Frank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of English

Now let's see some of this at work.

We're going to look at a few descriptions from a great American novelist and

story writer.

His name is James Salter.

And while we read we'll play a little game.

Salter was a West Point graduate, a pilot in the Korean War, but

then he left the military to write novels.

He also wrote a couple of screenplays, and he wrote collections of short stories.

He started publishing in the 1950s.

One of the great novels of the 20th century published by an American writer

is Light Years.

It came out in 1975.

He was a supremely elegant stylist, what's sometimes called a writer's writer.

He often even lamented sometimes that he was praised so often for

writing such beautiful sentences, but boy, are they good.

Now for the discussion boards this week,

we'll put up his link to his interview with the Paris Review.

You recall that there was a Paris Review interview earlier this segment with

John Updike where he talks about Mark Twain.

For now, let's look at a story that James Salter published in the New Yorker

that's going to be part of this week's work at home.

Last Night,

his very short story that we'll read this week came out in 2002 in the New Yorker.

Somehow, it's the only story of his they ever published.

But in the New Yorker's fiction podcast, you can listen to the writer

Tom McGuane reading it and talking to the New Yorker's fiction editor,

Deborah Triesman, about that wonderful story.

We'll put that up in the discussion board and ask you to look at it.

All of the New Yorker's fiction podcasts are available anyone in the world to

download and listen to, and we'll also get you the text of that story to read.

Let's look at some of the writing itself and bore in,

and also we'll play a little game.

Okay, the game is I'll read a little bit of the story to you.

We're going to look at the words, but I'm going to leave a word out.

And then the video will pause.

I'll ask you to guess what the missing word was, and once you guess,

you can press the button.

And the other people taking the class,

you can see what their answers, what their guesses were.

Once we come back, I'll tell you what the word was.

All right.

You ready?

Here we go.

Last Night by James Salter.

Walter Such was a translator.

He liked to write with a green fountain pen

that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence,

almost as if his hand were a mechanical device.

He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and

then give Rilke's translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty.

He was a sociable but also sometimes prickly man, who stuttered

a little at first and who lived with his wife in a manner they liked.

But Marit, his wife, was ill.

He was was sitting with Susanna, a family friend, Adverb,

they heard Marit on the stairs, and she came into the room.

She was wearing a red silk dress in which she had always been seductive,

with her loose breasts and sleek, dark hair.

In the white wire baskets in her closet were stacks of folded clothes, underwear,

sport things, night gowns, the shoes jumbled beneath on the floor.

Things she would never again need.

Also jewelry, bracelets and necklaces, and a lacquer box with all her rings.

She had looked through the lacquer box at length and picked several.

She didn't want her fingers, bony now, to be naked.

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