Every word matters

A good many years ago, I was teaching a class of sophomores and we came to a passage in the text that I wanted the students to read closely. I can't remember what we were looking at, or even if it was prose or a poem. But I remember drawing the class's attention to one particular sentence.

"Why do you think the author used that word?" I asked. "There are plenty of synonyms he could have used; words which mean nearly the same thing, but not quite. Why this one?"

One girl huffed, "Well, I'm sure a writer doesn't pick and choose over each and every word!" as if I were a fool for even suggesting such a thing. Of course, I pushed back, and eventually got across my point that every single word does, in fact, matter.

I'm rereading The Sound and the Fury, and it's sometimes hard to remember my own dicta when working my way through what is probably the most opaque of Faulkner's novels. But I'm certainly reminded of it when I'm revising my own work. Specifically, with the story I'm working on now.

The story was inspired by a fire that happened just down the street from our house. An old farmhouse and an adjacent barn caught fire one night. It had long been abandoned; the windows were covered with plywood and what might have been a yard once was a weedy, trash-strewn vacant lot. The fire, when it happened, was pretty spectacular, if not quite worthy of Rebecca or Jane Eyre. But it got me to wondering, what if someone lived there? Squatters, or some family off the grid? Sort of like the Weather Undrground (see Zayd Ayers Dohrn's Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young)?

The story that came out of that fire was nothing like Dohrn's brilliant memoir, nor like the opening of William Golding's problematic novel Darkness Visible. Instead, a ten-year-old boy with long, ash-blond hair appears in the living room of Tim and Willie, a couple who live just down the street from the farmhouse with their son Jonathan. Who is the mysterious boy? How did he get into Tim's and Willie's house? Where are his parents? Does he have parents? And most puzzling of all, how is it that Jonathan, a couple of years younger, seems to know this strange child, and even cares for him?

I don't have any answers. I don't know what happened next, because I came away just then, as Grandpa used to say. That annoyed my friend John Briggs, who nearly always gets a first look at my stuff. He was "entranced" by the story, which coming from John is high praise indeed. But he admitted that he was "a little annoyed." He appreciated the mystery aspect, and didn't want the parents to explain everything, but wanted more from Jonathan. Why was he friends with the strange boy he calls Max? How did they come to know each other? Stuff like that, I guess.

John's going to remain frustrated, I'm afraid, as are you who are reading this post. As is my wont, I'm not going to give away an ending that I'm not even sure of myself. But John's concern did highlight a weakness, or shortcoming, in the story. Jonathan's friendship with Max may be puzzling, or even mysterious. But it can't be simply opaque. The reader needs to understand that there's a reason for Jonathan's evasion of his parents' questions. That there's a bond between him and the mysterious friend that we may not get (in the same way that Tim and Willie don't), but that is nonetheless real, and sincere, and perhaps even moving.

Every word counts. I work all afternoon, and discover that I've deleted half a dozen words, and replaced them with four different ones. A pause is written in. A sentence is struck, then reinserted in a different paragraph. I reread: is this a real person talking? Is it the person I originally envisioned? Or the one who has grown into my understanding? Would I know him, or her? And especially will my reader grasp that there is something special between these characters - Tim and Willie, Jackie the firefighter, and of course Jonathan and (if that's his real name) Max - that we may not completely understand, but which we recognize, and can cherish.