Painting with Soft Brush-Strokes

When I was a young woman I didn't care much about the words I used, and I cared only slightly about the meaning I was trying to convey. But as I got older, I discovered that the words that I used had power.

I began writing in the very late 1990s, though the exact moment blurs away now. I was terminally online even back then, hyperactive in forums and ludicrously-present on various websites for whatever interests and attractions my inner squirrel had seized upon in that era.

I'd written one or two "decent" pieces of work while still at school thanks to the encouragement of the best teacher I ever had, and I was a voracious reader even back then. But it was only once I was online that I started to really explore myself and my... ahem... likes.

I trod the well-trodden path with Star-Wars slash fan-fiction (all thankfully lost to Entropy now) and somewhere along the line I discovered Literotica - and with it a wellspring of all manner of things that my inner self clearly craved.

I read many of the top list items in the categories I found fun or intriguing, and discovered some things I liked, and many I didn't. Of course the inner squirrel brain wanted to share my own ideas with others. So I wrote something, and hit submit, and here we are. It's been twelve years since I first set "pen to paper" here - in the intervening time the world has changed, and I have changed with it. I've grown - perhaps I've even grown up, though I suspect the jury is still out on that.

Somehow along the way I've published a number of works people have really liked. One reader, in a comment, said something to me that touched me deeply. He or she wrote (and I paraphrase) that what they loved most was how I "painted a canvas with soft brush-strokes". I thought that was a very astute way to describe part of what I do - but I wanted to try to commit it to an actual physical record rather than a loose conglomeration of feelings up in my frontal lobe somewhere.

Let me be up front on this: I don't feel that what I do is somehow special or unique - there's no magic, mystical conduit between me and Tennyson or Chaucer, for starters. I don't feel that the stories I write are somehow "better" - some of them feel distinctly sub-par to me, when I read them again several years later.

Yet despite this, the comments flow in - mostly kind, sometimes heartbreaking. People tell me (often privately) how my words have touched them, made them laugh, made them cry, made them reach out and hug someone, or - hardest of all - made them wish with all their being that the person they wanted to reach out and hug was still there. I've cried more times than I really care to remember over what people write to me about their lives. Life is hard, love is harder, and sometimes words are all we have left to remember people by.

So - know this. Understand it and believe it deep within you: the words you use have power. Writing them will change you, and may also change me and the others who read them. And these changes will be in ways that you often will not be able to predict.

A caveat - I am not a trained author, I have no degree in English or Literature or Drama. I am not even remotely comparable to a professional author of the stature of some we have here on Literotica. I am merely a woman of some latent talent who taught herself to write by reading the greater works of giants and aping them - and now I am someone who hopes to help you all feel something from what she writes for you.

Ultimately - writing is my hobby, it's my church, it's where I get to do something that I'm good at, anonymously and with nothing but the most ephemeral of legacies - which is precisely how I want it. But that doesn't mean I don't want to leave ripples. I'm strange that way.

So: here is a list of some of the things I do. It's not a how-to. It will not make you a great author. But it might start you down the path towards making you a good one, and from there who knows what you will come to be?

1. Choose words that establish the scene

It is easy, as a new writer, to think that more is better - but the truth is that more is almost never better (except in matters of crème brûlée where I feel that it is never possible to have enough).

Far more important than the volume of your writing is the skill of it, and part of that skill is understanding the proper use of words. Words have meaning - sometimes far more than the face value of their currency, when considered in their setting. Words - sometimes a single word - can make or break a line... or a scene, or a tale.

Consider the familiar sentence below:

It was a dark and stormy night.

This old chestnut frequently comes up as an example of what not to do - for good reason. It's a cliché, and while clichés have their places, this one almost never does.

Picture the scene. It could be a Gothic horror setting. It could be the Dark Woods. For me, it's almost always going to be a coastal storm because of where and how I grew up. Coastal and ocean storms are a class of terror few experience - in my opinion they are among the most primal of experiences you can have. Tick, we have a scene.

Now... how on earth can I convey that sense of terror to my reader? I could of course write:

The huge waves crashed terrifyingly on the rocks below

Fine. That's fine. It conjures a scene of sorts. But if I sit and read those words it's like the label on a pair of second hand granny panties in a charity shop; nobody's going to enjoy it. We can do better. We owe it to ourselves to do better. So:

The towering waves roared against the jagged rocks below

This is an improvement. We've immediately got some onomatopoeia in the use of roared and a nice adjective jagged. But by subtly tuning our word choice we can go further.

The towering waves clawed at the jagged rocks below

If you contrast this to the sentence before the meaning is almost exactly the same, but the feeling is different. We've gone from a passive scene where waves crash on rocks, to a scene where you're implying malevolent intent on the part of the waves; they are actively attempting to destroy the rocks and, by implication, the viewer. And all it took was the alteration of two words to do this.

This is not hard. It's the work of a few minutes to change a sentence; but the overall effect can be profound - if you get it right.

Let's do another.

The room's lighting was dim and muted

Dim? How dim? Are there any lights at all, or is it simply daylight filtering in from outside, or light from a fire? And what is the room? Is it a library? A dining room? A pantry?

The study was lit by the dim glow of a single lamp

Better - but where is the lamp? What kind of lamp is it? I'm a visual girl, I need to be able to picture what's going on, I want to be shown, not told, or even better yet I want to be released so that I can create the scene in my own squirrel mind. So...

A single, battered lamp lit the study from its allotted corner.

Already we can picture the lamp and the (probably) softer, more yellow glow that a lamp of this sort would cast rather than the harsh white of a modern LED. I can imagine the old green glass, the brass with its patina of age, the dent where someone dropped something on the base plate long ago...

Your words are paint for the reader's mind. You can scribble on some bright colours with some crayon and call it a day... or you can spend a minute finessing it and be Rembrandt van Rijn - even if just for a moment.

Isn't it worth that minute of extra effort? I feel it is.

2. Choose words based on your desired end goal

There is a hierarchy of degrees for most descriptive words or phrases, and the ability to pick between them is a valuable tool in your painter's kit.

A summer's day is bright, it is also glorious, and hot, and humid, and perfect, and golden and slow and lethargic and breeze-kissed and... you get the picture. Similarly, night is dark and shadowed and mystical and magic and enchanted and fearful and terrifying and mortal. Storms are raging and beautiful and terrifying and overwhelming and distant.

A kiss can be slow or quick or hot or cold or furtive or blatant or desperate, tears can be silent or bitter or endless or brief or private or dramatic.

Each of these things - night, storm or kiss - becomes an entirely different thing with the choice of adjective that goes with it or the phrasing that brackets it. You can subtly (or overtly) alter the mood of an entire paragraph through the choice of how you pick one word or phrase.

Let's play make-believe and construct a dramatic scene:

a tear ran down her cheek

Oh look. She's crying. How sad.

a small tear ran down her cheek

She's not crying much, can't be all that bad. Do I care? Mm... I'm not sure. What's for tea? Cake? Ooh, yummy.

a glittering tear ran down her cheek

Ooh, dramatic tears. Yawn. Oh, look! There's chocolate ganache...

A glittering tear beaded, tracked downwards... then fell free

Aah. There we go. Now it's not about the cheek and where the tear was running. Now it's different. Now we've got words describing a specific, fraught moment. Our protagonist is observing whoever is crying closely enough to notice the exact moment when a tear breaks free from her cheek and falls.

Making this change has also radically altered the the intensity of the moment. Sure - I've cheated a bit because the meaning of the sentence has changed, but that is part and parcel of the craft of writing. Sometimes what you start with and what you end up with are as different as chalk and quicklime.

Read and reread your sentences. Change their order. Play with the order of words; some orderings are subtly better than others. Swap in a simile to create alliteration, or to alter the mood. Fling in a pun if you can bear it. Experiment with the rhythm and cadence of the words. Play around... and then return to the story again.

3. Choose words that demonstrate how your character feels in this moment

Don't tell me that your character is sad, show me. Allow me to be in the moment with her, in this awful, horrible moment when most people's stomachs go hollow and our throats go tight and our voice goes all hoarse and those awful, hot, salty tears start to flow and it feels like the end of the fucking world...

Let me live and breathe that.

"She was sad" is for recipes or laundry lists.

"Her throat ached and she felt like she couldn't quite catch her breath" is where I start to believe that she's sad.

The first example is a simple description of a state - the sky is blue, the dog is smelly, the cat is murderous. It's prosaic, dull and boring.

The second however... it is showing the first signs of magic. There's a hook in it, a little barb that, once under my skin, won't ever quite let go.

How do you make that hook? It's simple - ask yourself "How would I feel were this me?"

How would you feel if the woman you loved told you she was done? How would you feel if your daughter took her last breath in your arms? How would you feel if the last words your mother said to you were "I wish it had been you, not her."

Do you feel that? That hot, stabbing emptiness behind your ribs, the sudden difficulty in thinking, the shadows that have gathered in your peripheral vision as a distinct part of you dies forever?

Take that feeling and nail it to the paper. Write it over and over, changing the words to make the shadows blacker or the pain worse. When you're done hurting yourself, stop. Let the words lie there for a day or a week, and then come back and read them over. If it hurts to read them, if your throat still gets tight and your eyes burn - then you've done what you set out to do.

You can do the same with lightness, of course - joy, pleasure, ecstasy... but it's the shadows that make us human; it's the shadows that define our place in the world, and it's the shadows that linger when all joy has blown away like smoke.

4. Choose the words that turn the rough sketch into a finished painting

Some people will likely find it easier than others, but there really is no trick to it beyond this. Picture your characters in your mind. Picture their face, the tone of their voice, the accent, the way they're holding their head, the colour of their hair in the half-light.

Now - pick the words that make that scene real. If her hair cascades down over her shoulders, write that. If her voice bubbles with a little touch of suppressed laughter, write that. If there's no light and all you can see is her shadow, write that. Write that her tee shirt is azure rather than just blue. Write that her hair is honey-gold rather than blonde. Write that her one leg is slightly longer than the other, giving her an almost-imperceptible limp. Write that she has a freckle on her chin that she covers with base. Write about the hole in her scarf, or the rough patch on her right elbow where her jacket has almost worn through because she leans on that elbow when thinking. Write about the way she has of holding her head at an angle, as if she's just heard something she can't quite place.

Now... write about the way her face pales as you tell her that she's not the one. Capture the desperation in her words as she begs you not to leave her. Describe the hopeless sobs she cries there in the thin winter sunlight as you harden your heart and turn away as you believe you must.

Or, if you prefer, write about the way that she collapses in against you as you see her again after a long absence. Write the taste of her tears on your lips as you kiss her. Write the way everything else fades into irrelevance as you feel her close her arms around you and hold you in that way that has always left you breathless. Write the fear you feel every time you say goodbye - the fear that keeps you up at night, watching her as she sleeps, knowing that there will be a day where she won't be there.

When you can do that and capture the scene with the careful selection of words, and leave even yourself affected with the dreaded dusty eyes - congratulations. Lean back in your chair and dwell on your moment of greatness.

Now make every moment like that if you can. You'll fail, mostly - but try anyway.

In closing - paint your canvas with soft brushstrokes. Take away what is unnecessary.

But most importantly, choose the words with the love and care they deserve...

And keep writing.

I'd like to thank EmilyMiller for letting me bounce this off her before publishing it. Em, thanks, you're a star.