I want to be clear at the start, the sort of thing I'm talking about occasionally turns up in stories that are otherwise quite good--even stories I've paid good money for, and then during editing I talked to the author about ways the sentence in question might be improved. So it's not as though one or two infelicitous words are tanking your subs. But I see a lot of this in slush. If you're doing this a lot, fixing it won't mean you'll suddenly start selling and appearing on Hugo ballots and whatnot. It just means that one aspect of your work will be very much improved. But that's what it's all about, isn't it? Step by tiny, careful step.
So. One of the things that makes it easy to reject some subs really quickly is sentences like this:
The waitress inclined the coffee pot. Black liquid oozed into the maw of the cup underneath. The beverage bounced around the ceramic container.*
There are a couple of things going on here, I think, both related to each other. On the one hand, you've got an otherwise admirable desire to avoid repeating words. The writer doesn't want "coffee" five times in two sentences. And the other, I suspect, is an (also otherwise admirable) attempt to describe things well, and not only well, but strikingly. "The waitress poured coffee into the cup" might seem blah, more telling than showing and so often we're told to show not tell, right?
Yeah, don’t get me started on that one. But that's not the topic for today. I'll merely dismiss it by advising you to ask yourself if the coffee is actually important to the scene, or if it's just background action, during a conversation, say, and not something that the character is using as a self-distraction (carefully observing the coffee for a few seconds in order to collect herself, or frame a difficult statement, let's say). My advice--don't waste detail on things that don't matter. If nothing else, your reader is going to interpret close attention to the coffee as a signal that it's important, and if it's not, that's a miscue.
But that sort of leads me to my next actual point. Cueing the reader is what you're doing as a writer. Your words cue certain associations in the mind of your reader, and word by word, association by association, you're building the experience of your story, whatever effect you're striving for, in the reader's mind. Words are all you have to work with, to do this. Each and every word needs to be exactly the right one, otherwise the cumulative effect will fail.
Every word has a whole raft of associations attached to it. Many of them are common to most fluent speakers of a given language. What this means is, you can't substitute synonyms without altering the set of associations your readers are going to experience when they read your sentence. "Mouth" and "maw" mean more or less the same thing, but each carries a slightly different set of associations, and hence a different connotation. You can't just use "maw" as a more interesting word for "mouth." It won't communicate plain "mouth" to your readers.
And "oozed"? Well, kind of. But it's not quite right, is it? But what if you're trying to describe the movement of coffee from pot to cup and you can't quite figure out what word is best? I suspect this is behind at least half of the odd word choices I've seen. I suspect the writer wants very badly to vividly describe some action or object and is hunting for some word or phrase that won't be like every other written description of coffee pouring into a cup.
When you're in this situation, I think the best thing to do is ask yourself two questions. One, as above, is "does this really warrant this sort of attention?" and if the answer is yes--in the end, only you as the writer can answer that question--then the next question is, "Is this really the right word?"
Don’t throw away the thesaurus. Instead, think long and carefully about what you find there. How does coffee move from pot to cup? It's not really viscous enough to genuinely ooze, is it. Pour--you've already decided that's too vanilla. Go pour yourself some coffee and watch it closely. Does it slide? Does it sheet? Does it cascade? Does it tumble? I can't answer that for you. It depends what you're trying to do. (It also depends on what the coffee is pouring out of. But that's a digression just now.)
What do you imagine when someone says "it sheeted down"? Does that match what you want your reader to imagine? No? Then it's not the right word. No, not even if it's only slightly not quite what you're going for. Take all day if you need to. Take longer. Meditate on the various images the different words bring to mind. Mark it in red and come back to it later--but don't just say "Well, oozed is close enough," because it's not. And never forget, "poured" may be exactly what you need, and if that's the case it doesn' t matter in the slightest how many times you've seen "coffee poured" in print.
How about that "inclined"? Surely there's a better word for the waitress' action with the pot ("tilted" or "tipped" would be the obvious, and don't just dismiss the obvious out of hand. If it's right, it's right) but then again, maybe you're going at it all wrong. Why are you describing it at that level of detail? Maybe you can take the whole thing from another angle.
Consider that your whole approach, the entire sentence (or group of sentences) might be wrong from the start. Why is the pour of coffee important here? Notice that too much attention to the repetition of "coffee" or "cup" in the sentences above obscures the fact that the entire action can be condensed down to one very brief sentence, or even cut entirely. Consider the possibility that this is the best solution. Perhaps it isn't, but consider it. Consider it seriously.
Now, of course we can't control every reader's every associations. We can really only go with what our own impressions, and our own experience of other people, indicates is most likely. Some readers will have reactions you can't anticipate--that's just life. It's not the fault of British writers who dress their characters in "jumpers" that I automatically see my own elementary school uniform, nor is it my fault that (so I'm told) a British reader will for at least a moment find it odd that a character of mine walks out the door in nothing but a shirt and pants.** Anyone who hasn't watched O Brother Where Art Thou as many times as I have won't realize that I'm going to be thrown out of a story where a character suddenly exclaims, "We're in a tight spot!" But the more you read, the better your grasp of potential associations will be.
Now, you may be asking yourself why this would get a sub rejected very quickly. Maybe it's only a problem in the first sentence or two? Maybe a few odd word choices would be easily fixable and the story is otherwise amazing? But in my experience, pervasive bad word choices almost always go hand in hand with structural choices that are not easily fixable. Consider, in the example above, half the problem may well be the fact that those sentences are entirely unnecessary. That's something that's only visible if you've got a handle on your structure, and you already have a good idea of what details are significant and what aren't, and what words will convey that.
Fixing word choices won't fix that problem. But it'll get you partway there, and I think it's a step in the right direction.
_____
*I made this up. It is not a quote from any sub I have ever received or seen. It's a trifle clumsier than the average, actual thing, IMO.
**actually, I avoid "pants" for just this reason, but that's my own choice, not a rule anyone else needs to follow.
***I leave possible solutions to the third sentence as an exercise for the reader.
Sort of like martial arts. While a student is thinking about techinque, the thought slows them down and they aren't as good as just someone swinging away. The training has to hit the subconscious before improvement is shown.
I'm not sure whether you mean transparent or poetic or something else entirely.
I figured you didn't mean that and probably meant something like "resembling prose I'd like to emulate." Or else that I'd misremembered the word.
The waitress inclined the coffee pot. Black liquid oozed into the maw of the cup underneath.
I *love* this. This is obvious an urban fantasy story, and the person watching the cup is about to set foot on a path that will lead them to encounters with vampires, werewolves, or other forces of darkness.
I can see it work ironically, too: if the character in a chick lit novel has coffee with her best friend who wants her to do something stupid and ill-advised to 'help her out' so she can double-date or something.
The last sentence, on the other hand, breaks the mood - swirling around does not go with 'maw' and the implied forces of darkness, and 'ceramic' is far too mundane. So the problem for me with this is that it bounces all over the place in terms of register, and *that* is something a writer can learn to watch for even when they're not quite sure of their description skills: 'is it consistent' is much easier to resolve than 'finding the best way to talk about a cup of coffee'.
This too, yes. I tend to think of it as part of the same thing--choosing bright cheerful pink in a scene that's meant to be ominous, or the mood of the narrator is...let's say she's grieving, fearful, depressed, whatever...can only work as a deliberate contrast, in which case your word choice ought to point up the irony and not just look screamingly oblivious to it.
And yeah, a part of the problem is a register problem, or I usually call it diction but I'm pretty sure we mean the same thing. But I think that's caused by the search for the striking word without a good understanding of register itself. The subs I'm talking about are...a few steps behind what you're describing in skill level. Which is fine, everybody starts somewhere. The first time someone explained the concept to me I couldn't see it. I looked at the examples and just....but I think having seen them helped later.
I think that's one of the hardest things to teach, and might in fact be unteachable - the feel for which word is appropriate and where. Going by the dictionary, porcelain, china, and ceramic all mean approximately the same thing, but oh, what differences.
The first time someone said to me that words really do matter I was a bit perplexed - if they get the concept across, why quibble? The more I learn, the more I understand just *how much* an educated reader will get out of a text - which does not mean that *all* readers notice.
I'm at a point where I can understand much more than I can actually _do_ with words - I can see the difference between prose that works well and prose that doesn't, and quite often tell you why, but I can't write prose that lives up to my own standards, so I am a *very frustrated writer* right now.
That said, in short stories I'm a minimalist and anything I describe is for plot or to deepen characterization or to ground the reader a bit. Anything else is really a note to myself and it must be cut, no matter how pretty the prose is.
Except coffee. We do not cut the coffee. My characters drink copious amounts of it and then I must describe how they eliminate it from their systems. Because otherwise my reader will assume they never do, right?
Oz
I'm not a minimalist exactly--it's just...if you're going to add extra pretties, they should be truly pretty, and/or one ought to take the trouble to polish them and ground them in your structure. IMO. And it's not like I always manage to do that, but it's a goal.
Doing this deliberately is obviously one thing, but some people seem to think they're required to do it...
Oz
In my experience, in slushy subs lots of unnecessary mundane details isn't so much the result of a philosophy or approach as, I think, the writer knowing she needs to describe the scene to at least some extent and kind of grabbing random stuff and not knowing what level of detail will work or even what details to add.
Word choice won't fix that, of course. And when it happens in subs a few steps up from there, yeah, that's something else. It's hard to make that sort of thing work, and while I might enjoy one or two well-done examples, I don't want to read it regularly.
(If I'm reading Jack Vance, yes, I want to know what the characters had for breakfast.)
So yes, sometimes the coffee (had to come back to that) is the whole point. (Going back for another cup now.)
That's a great term. I'm suffering from this - not on a room-to-room basis, but I find it hard to skip across time and space and keep a sense of the story without showing what actually happened/what actually was said.
Hm. I would have said that the two are not related, but I think I can see a connection between writing-what-happens and not being able to choose the actions and description that are most useful for the story. I shall go ponder that some more.
And like anything, I suspect this can be overdone to the point that it makes everything confusing and choppy. :D
Oz
abject naturalism
IMNSHO, it's only key words that should not be repeated. Many, many words in our writing fade into the background. Look at all the articles I've used in this comment. Bet no one is upset at the repetition. I'm actually of the opinion that the repetition is what makes the word fade from importance, and it's why we don't repeat the words that really matter to the story. So if the waitress pouring the coffee is just a bit of world building, she should just pour the coffee, no matter how many times you've said "pour" and "coffee." If "pour" and "coffee" aren't critical, I think the repetition is better for the story.
By the way, speaking as one who loves mysteries, repetition like this is a great way to hide something in plain sight. If your waitress pours coffee eight times in the story, and it's critical to the outcome that she gave or did not give a certain character coffee, calling attention to it with unusual prose will make the audience pay attention to who gets coffee and when. Just having her pour coffee eight times will make the reader ignore it, and then kick themselves when your intrepid detective reveals the importance later on. :)
I generally agree with you, that working too hard to avoid repeating words leads to more problems than it solves, and often there wasn't a problem to solve to begin with. Though I wish I could paste in here a sentence from a sub a while ago that lacked any sort of desire to avoid repeating words. That writer could have profited from considering the issue. Sometimes it matters. But said? Bright, shining Mithras, don't go looking for synonyms to avoid using "said"!
I think also sentence structure matters--when a word gets repeated in stressed positions it reads as much more intrusive than when one is stressed and one not. And sometimes when a sentence repeats too much--"I asked for more coffee, so the coffee-shop waitress poured coffee from the coffee pot to the coffee cup"--(dang, that's not as bad as I was going for) can tell you that you're going at your sentence from the wrong direction and it might pay to stop and rethink the whole thing.
And there's a problem with the assumption that strong, striking writing must of necessity use unusual, striking words. This is not the case. But I can see how one might come to that conclusion.
'Said' can jump out at a reader. A really obscure term will stand out when you use it more than twice in a book; while other words can be repeated twice in a paragraph, but at some point, they *will* come to attention.
I'm not trying to say that 'the writer, the author, the person who put pen to paper, the creator of this work of fiction' is the way to go - it feels forced very quickly and has me looking around to see whether they all refer to the same person or whether there's more than pne professional scribbler in the room - but very few words are truly invisible, and once one of them has caught your attention it has the potential to greatly annoy you.
I feel bad, like they must feel I'm trying to crush their individuality, their writerly joie de vivre (and if you're writing finance papers, you really want to cling on to the scraps of joie that come your way)--but all the same, maw =/= mouth. No. Do not use "maw" unless you want people thinking of sharks and things.
And yes, in most circumstances, that much attention to the minutia of a character's actions is probably not warranted.
Actually, I'd disagree with that because you need *some* action, *some* setting anyway or the reader can't imagine what is going on.
So you will be writing down _something_. IF you are describing something, it should not read like filler - generic, bland prose takes up about the same amount of space as vibrant, telling detail does, but 'the waitress refilled [protag's] cup' is a lost opportunity to give us another insight into the protagonist's life or the setting they're in or a hint of foreshadowing/mood setting.
And no, I don't have an answer to which details one should pick or how to make them appropriate for the story - I am wrestling with this right now - but since you need to write down _something_ you might as well look around and find the detail that works best. That doesn't mean you need to be dramatic, but 'the waitress refilled the cup with a bored expression for the third time' 'after a good five minutes of trying to catch the waitress' attention, protag finally succeeded' belong to subtly different stories.
I still love 'The waitress inclined the coffee pot. Black liquid oozed into the maw of the cup underneath' because it's immediate - we're _right there_ as the cup gets filled, whereas in my examples you have slightly distant narration. Something else I'm working on.
Each of those instance might not feel like much, but over a book, they add up.
I guess the main thing I'm reacting to is slightly wrong synonyms.