![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Diction
Diction means word-choice. It's the difference between red and Carmine, pigheaded and obdurate. Style and voice are created in part by word choices. Direct, simple words get readers involved in the story without drawing attention to the narrator.
Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver relied on the power of spare, precisely clipped diction.
Exotic words and convoluted syntax draw attention to your presence as narrator and maker of the story.
You need to decide if this is the narrator you want to be. Diction strained by circumlocution can suggest self-conscious writers who hide gut feelings behind big words. Some writers fall in love with their own words, and sacrifice their stories on the alter of their ingenuity. But a writer like Vladimir Nabokov makes arcane and esoteric diction part of the richness of his fictional world.
See Narrator, Psychic Distance, Style, Texture.
Diction
Diction means word-choice. It's the difference between red and Carmine, pigheaded and obdurate. Style and voice are created in part by word choices. Direct, simple words get readers involved in the story without drawing attention to the narrator.
Cara walked into her closet. She took out three pairs of shoes. The black pumps she put on. The running shoes she put in her handbag. The ballet slippers she pushed down into the front pockets of her jeans. She was read.
Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver relied on the power of spare, precisely clipped diction.
Exotic words and convoluted syntax draw attention to your presence as narrator and maker of the story.
Cara's closet, incandescent with the liquid fall of her clothing (A, bright fall, fortunate fall!), breathed cognac velours, thin gin strapless gowns, bright frocks of mescal and arak. She selected a water-white silk so slippery, so deceptive, so elusive, so undependable, so perfidious, that it would insouciantly slide off her shoulders and ebb up her thighs with the most blameless, casual, and innocent of movements. Cara licked her lips.
You need to decide if this is the narrator you want to be. Diction strained by circumlocution can suggest self-conscious writers who hide gut feelings behind big words. Some writers fall in love with their own words, and sacrifice their stories on the alter of their ingenuity. But a writer like Vladimir Nabokov makes arcane and esoteric diction part of the richness of his fictional world.
See Narrator, Psychic Distance, Style, Texture.