Well, here we are in the first segment of the Craft of Style. And we're going to talk about meaning, sense, and clarity. You're going to use, to put pressure on each word to mean what it says to be sensible, and most importantly, to be clear. Mark Twain has this to say about it. Mark Twain, whom we all know, the American novelist and famous humorist. He said, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. What does he mean lightning and a lightning bug? Well, lightning is one word, and a lightning bug is a completely different kind of word, but they're almost exactly the same. Isn't it amazing? You write three letters and the meaning changes completely. And that is also the difference between very, very small distinctions in the language and modifiers and adjectives that you use from time to time. All right, let's look at this in a little bit more detail from another 19th century American, the poet Emily Dickinson. This is Emily Dickinson talking to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? A great line. What do we take away from it? That it feels as if physically as if the top of her head were taken off. Why does she use that particular expression? I think it's because the description has landed in her body. It has produced a kind of physical response and that's a kind of miraculous thing, right? Because language shouldn't really be able to communicate with us in a way that's so direct. Because it's a means of communication, right? Isn't it just a code that goes in and we know the difference between a word, an idea and an actual expression? It's not really as though there was a fire in her head, it's as if there were a fire on her head. But sometimes, when we're reading a really good story, we even have the physical feeling of being cold. And that's only possible when you're using words in a super precise way. SO that's what we're going to try and do during this segment and for the rest of this module. As we'll discuss later on in this course, Amity Gaige and I, she teaches the course on setting and description. We're going to talk about the idea of putting an idea inside of a thing and why that's so important in fiction writing, and it's one of the important things we're going to be talking about in style. In other words, not any old thing but putting ideas inside the body. Why is that important for this particular kind of writing? It's not necessarily important if you're writing an encyclopedia entry. It's not necessarily important if you're writing an op-ed, but writing a story is about a person having an experience. And in many, many ways, what that means is that you have to choose words that have reference to our physical experience. Of a place, of another person, of a sound, of what something feels like, what it tastes like, what it smells like, what it looks like. So, why the body? Why physical life? Aristotle, do you remember him? He wrote that all knowledge begins with experience of the senses. Okay, that's where it comes from. What does that mean for us as story writers and as stylists? Unlike writers in other forms, who are dealing with ideas, we are dealing with things. And the things are available to us through our senses. So you have to show the reader the world in physical language. This is hugely important for a story writer. Why do we as readers crave to learn things in this way? That is, through our senses. Well, Aristotle has something to say about that too. Here he is. Your fellow students are from everywhere in the world, but possibly not from Ancient Greece. All right, let's put up the text as it is in English. All people by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses. For even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves, and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing, one might say, to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things. You know an interesting thing about ancient Greek is they would use the word for to see, the past perfect version of to see, is what you would often use to say that you knew something. To say I know him, you would say I have seen him. It is very interesting. So, I think what Aristotle is getting at is that sight, how something looks, is totally primary to our sense of knowing something and having an experience. What else is really important in this passage? Well, for me the word delight is really great. Because part of what we're talking about in story making is not just instructing or trying to get across information, but getting across information through pleasure, very often. Even sometimes pleasure that surrounds things that ought not to be very pleasurable. But there's something captivating about a vivid moment, an experience that someone's had that might be really terrible, and yet we get something out of it that's a jolt of the real. And that's only available to us when we can describe things in sensual language. So, we're going to have an opportunity later on in this module to put some of that into practice.
