Words and Wells

My recommendation for beginning writing is as follows: do not start with sentences, with the easy and fluid liaisons of phrases, with the heft of lines upon lines stacking up. Instead, start with words, or perhaps with a single word. Find the words first. Then make of them a haiku. Then write a single sentence that fills the space of your creativity. But words first, always words.

Writing and the Politics of Language

“Our words are similar to wells,” says the poet César Calvo, “and those wells can accommodate the most diverse waters: cataracts, drizzles of other times, oceans that were and will be of ashes, of human beings, and of tears as well. Our words are like people, and sometimes much more, not simple carriers of only one meaning.”

Words have power, and presence, and a history of which we are sometimes unaware. It is prudent, as a writer, to use language consciously, to be as intentional as possible about tones and moods and the colors of the page.

The following list is cautionary: yes, feel free to use the words on this list, and perhaps builds tropes (a hifalutin’ word) around them; but be aware of the impact such words may have, of their sharpness or fuzziness, of the surprising ways in which readers might respond.

Slippery Words… 

have the peculiar quality that all definitions are provisional: creativity, multicultural, objectivity Self/self, universal, subjectivity, objectivity, consciousness, Mind/mind, culture, art, mind-body, bodymind, minority, cognition, fulfilment, dominant, soul, mainstream, gender, spirit (and spirituality), transformation, truth, internal, external, healing, enlightenment, growth.

Flag-Draping and Eyebrow-Raising Words… 

telegraph particular political perspectives: corporate, colonial, anything-centric, mindset, postcolonial, deep, ecology, liberal, conservative, radical, ahistorical, postmodern, therapeutic.

Hifalutin’ Words… 

are often used improperly in service of erudition: Cartesian, Newtonian, aesthetic, duality, modality, schema, construct, notion, praxis, hegemony, structural (con/de/post), pedagogy, liminal, archetype, paradigm (/shift), positivism, hermeneutic, teleology.

Hand Grenade Words… 

tend to provoke strong reactions in readers: oppression, prejudice, marginalized, race, conspiracy, agenda, supposed, aggression, trauma, wound, academia, terrorism, tyranny, shame-based. (Hand grenade words have fuses of roughly fifty pages.)