Tag Archives: denotation

The Writer’s Toolbox
Real Heroes Don’t Get Charlie Horses
Part 4: But how do I do it?


inkwellIdentifying the words that have connotation worth mining can be a challenge if you are not used to thinking of words in this fashion. Poetry is rife with examples of mining connotation. Find some you like or that has an emotional component like one you are looking for and read it. Make notes; pay close attention to metaphor; write down words that attract your attention. Contemplate what those words contribute. Look them up in the dictionary, then the thesaurus.

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Hey, as long as you have the thesaurus open on your desk or desktop, peruse it. Think about how some words evoke different feelings within you, even though they are under the same heading. Pairs like shadow and shade, rock and stone, chill and cool all have different connotations. Shadow tends to be spooky or disturbing, shade restful. Rock is a little less formal-sounding than stone, and the use of rock is more common in the western United States and stone more so in the east. Cool is refreshing, chill is unpleasant, even scary.

As you look through the thesaurus entries, note that the long and complex words tend to leave you cold. Long Latinate-based words can be too neutral. In the worst scenario, they can be so dispassionate as to feel cold. When you are working with neutral words, some are better than others even if neither has heavy connotation. Shorter words tend to be better and are usually not Latinate. Our original example of The clouds moved across the sky, though neutral, is much better than The clouds locomoted across the sky. They are both synonyms from the thesaurus, but locomoted is long and Latinate. Latinate words run the risk of being boring, off putting, cold, or scientific feeling. That said, I like the sound of The clouds traversed the sky. Maybe there is a story where that would be the right choice.

Now that you have looked through some thesaurus entries, it is time to try an exercise to help your next scene. I had a terribly difficult time with a battle scene, and I kept consulting with readers and SCA fighters and reading books on tactics. The scene got more organized, but it never got better. I finally figured out that all the staging and proper window dressing in the world was not going to save the scene. What it lacked was an emotional connection to the reader. Emotional situations were happening; they just weren’t connecting with my reader on an emotional level. So I did two things, I looked for ways to expand my understanding of what sensory events were occurring in a battle (in my case I watched movie and Internet clips), and I spent time with a thesaurus to generate lists of words related to events, the sensory experiences of the characters, and relating to what I watched on the clips. Here are some of the words I looked up: battle, slash, clangor, explode, rage, weak, energy, dance, destroy, adrenalin, taste, scent, perfume, odor, cloying, and fetid. Note how the last five relate. If a word doesn’t work (perfume didn’t work for me) keep looking. Look up entries from within the list you are looking at, they themselves will likely have alternative choices, which will help you refine your word lists.

Now you have useful words swimming about your head ready for you to pluck. Or a list you’ve generated to peruse when you feel you need stronger or different terms. The result for my battle scene was nothing short of transforming. It may not have become the definitive scene to end all battle scenes, but it jumped the chasm from boring to engaging.

Go Forth and Do

If you look at your writing, you may see that you have made choices already where connotation is aiding you. Now you understand what it is you were doing when you chose those words. With your conscious understanding of connotation as a tool for writing, you can control more effectively how your reader connects to the scene you are portraying. You can amp up or dial down the emotional elements, revving up your readers or resting them so you can take them refreshed on the next thrill ride. Your job as a writer is to provide the reader the emotional experience they seek. Connotation can be a powerful and subtle tool for manipulating the emotional connection between your story and your reader, so get out your virtual whetstone, hone your new tool, and put it into your writer’s toolbox.

The Writer’s Toolbox
Real Heroes Don’t Get Charlie Horses
Part 3: Pitfalls, Why Are There Always Pitfalls?

pitfalls-1a

As with everything, pitfalls await you as you experiment with connotation. For one thing, connotation can be cultural. 9-1-1 instantly brings up painful memories for people in the United States, but this combination of numbers might leave a blank stare on the face of someone who lives in South Africa for instance. Both are English speaking, so they share a language, but that culture did not experience the tragic events of September 11.

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What is true culturally is also true individually. Your experiences within your culture differ from your neighbors, your coworker’s, even your own relatives. So what you find meaningful is not what someone else might. Every family has its stories, its inside jokes. These create a micro culture that is specific to that family. “Johnny, do you want a chicken leg?” mades my great aunt bust up laughing, but leaves me cold. She and her brother shared a chicken-leg story from their childhood. They’ve told me it, but I wasn’t there, I don’t remember the mundane story, but the event is etched vividly on Grandpa’s and Great Aunt’s minds such that chicken legs now have additional connotation, but a connotation that cannot be mined to reinforce the emotional scenery of any story I might write.

Another risk is that of purple prose. If you push too hard too fast with heavily laden connotations, you can wind up overwriting your scene such that it becomes melodramatic, trite, or comic. So when I push, I try to get readers to review the words, and then I question them about spots where I felt I might have pushed too hard if they haven’t already mentioned it.

This is a clunker from my past that I took a brief risk with: He finished his run of the line with a feather of hope tickling his liver. The grounds upon which I based this risk were that among the four humors, hope is associated with sanguine, blood, and liver, so I went for the liver tickle. Problem is, the four humors are more remote than, say, liver and onion jokes. And the association of liver with hope is a distant connotation that just doesn’t ring soundly enough with modern readers to rely upon it. Solution? Just drop the last three words. I knew at the time it was likely headed for the axe, but it is worth taking risks. I’ve been amazed at what uncomfortable risks have paid off. Try them, just be prepared to execute them.

The Writer’s Toolbox
Real Heroes Don’t Get Charlie Horses
Part 2: The Charlie Horse Syndrome and Other Ill Applied Connotations

So we’ve just reviewed what connotation is and how it can be used, but let’s look at what happens when the word with the wrong connotation is used. Enter our bad guy:

His lip curled into a leer as he towered over her. She shuddered every time he moved, at every flex of his fist, at every step that brought him closer. He pushed his fuzzy black hair away from his stone-cold eyes, and said…

Queue the sound of a record scratch…Huh? Fuzzy hair? Bunnies are fuzzy, chicks are fuzzy, our childhood teddy bears are fuzzy. Clowns have fuzzy hair, your BFF has fuzzy hair on bad hair days, newborns have fuzzy heads…Do you see the commonality? All of these things are nonthreatening.

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Threatening things are not fuzzy: Wild boars bristle; hissing cats raise their hackles; and gorillas thump their chests as their hair stands on end. While you might stretch the denotation of fuzzy to cover a boar, hissing cat, or angry gorilla, the connotation just screams out against it. So here, the villain has got himself a comic do. Read it again, only this time substitute the word wild for fuzzy. Same tangle-haired look, different feel. One builds your tension, one ruins it.

The title example is one of my favorites and really underlines the point well. In it, the scene is dire and the pain all but unendurable. Note how the end undermines a lot of work to portray a desperate situation. In this example, our fantasy hero is being tortured by magic:

Every time the witch curled her finger or touched him, Gerrick felt another muscle convulse. She brushed Gerrick’s leg and his calves curled in pain. She traced her finger lightly up his thigh and blazed a fiery trail of knots up to his groin. She curled her lips in her knife-edged smile and leaned over to kiss his naked stomach. The muscled clamped so hard he choked on a mouthful of vomit. She worked her way up to his chest. His diaphragm snapped tight, knocking his breath from his laboring lungs. His heart clenched, shooting pain down his arm. By the time he threw his head back under the ratcheting of his neck muscles, he was in agony; the Charlie horse all over his body was the worst pain he’d ever felt.

A Charlie horse? A Charlie Horse is what Hubby gets in the middle of the your favorite show, and he goes hopping around holding his leg going, “Ow-ow-ow! Charlie horse, Charlie horse!” It’s a funny pain when you see someone with it. It’s a mundane pain, one I would say most would not associated with the worst pain they ever had. And frankly, the words Charlie horse just plain sounds light weight, even humorous.

So you see, real heroes don’t get Charlie horses.

The Writer’s Toolbox: Real Heroes Don’t Get Charlie Horses—Connotation Vs. Denotation

Part One: The Sacchariferous RoseToolbox2

What is in a name? A Rosa Indica by any other nomenclature reeks as sacchariferous…doesn’t it?

Not in a book, it doesn’t. A rose by any other name smells as sweet sounds a lot sweeter than the above rendition put together with synonyms.  The denotation of the words, the dictionary definition,  is close enough between the two that all substitutions either have the same dictionary definition or are listed in the thesaurus as synonyms.   So why do the two lines feel so different?

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Writing is an artificial means of creating something tangible within our minds.  The only tools authors have to reach into the minds of the readers are words and their conveyance.  But to tell a story is not merely to depict a map of places, a timeline of events, and a phenotype of characters.  The heart of a story is to convey an emotional experience to the reader.  This is where denotation can fall short of the task.

Enter connotation.  Connotation is the baggage that many words carry that you usually won’t find in a dictionary.  Words gather associations over time and across different cultures.  Take an apple for instance.  Strictly speaking, a fruit that evokes little emotion in me when I pick one up at the supermarket.  But pair it with the word Big, and now we have an exciting metropolis.  Or paint it multicolored stripes, and we think computer.  Or put it next to a snake, and we conjure temptation in out minds.  The apple hasn’t changed, just how you relate to it.

The same thing can be done with just about any word.  For instance consider the meaning of these five sentences:

The clouds moved across the sky

The clouds floated across the sky

The clouds lazed across the sky

The clouds raced across the sky

The clouds roiled across the sky

Do you feel a different relationship to the sentences?  Do you picture fluffy white clouds piled high on a warm sunny day for floated and lazed?  Do you see a blustery day for raced?  For roiled, are the clouds dark and threatening? Is a storm is coming?

And yet each entry is in essence the same as the first, moved.   What has changed is our emotional connection to each sentence.  This is because, through their use, words collect meanings that they did not originally have, and using a word with the right meaning and background for the tone of your situation enhances the emotion.

This emotional connection is the heart of engaging a reader, and connotation is a powerful tool to do that.