Tools Not Jewels

Don't Read, Won't Like

Some of you aren’t going to like this.

And that’s okay, because nothing in this world is universally liked except, perhaps, Tom Hanks. Everything has haters. Here is a practical exercise in hateration: Think of a book that is universally beloved and then look it up on Amazon and see if it has one-star reviews. The following are all from real one-star reviews on Amazon that you can look up for yourself.

To Kill a Mockingbird: “The book is an example of leading the witness”

Things Fall Apart: “It is a waste of time unless you want to read a piece of trash fiction with characters that have no personalties [sic] or emotions. 0/10 would not recommend”

Where the Wild Things Are: “Daughter didn’t like”

You can’t get much more damning that that. Destroy a masterpiece in three words: Daughter didn’t like. 

Okay, anyway, this is to say that you may resist the message of today’s Shelf Life and that’s okay, but I hope you will read it through and consider even so. If you make it to the end and you didn’t like it I hope you will leave a strongly worded one-star review in the comments and try to make it as witty and compelling as “daughter didn’t like.”

I’m going to start us off on the topic of beauty advice, which is relevant, just barely. Like it’s hanging on by a relevance thread. I’ve had a lot of beauty advice in my life from many different aestheticians, a couple of them excellent. A lot of times when an aesthetician gives you beauty advice it comes in the form of a platitude. Okay? They’re not just like “moisturize your face twice a day” they like have a saying to make it easy to remember. For instance:

Your eyebrows are sisters, not twins.

This is excellent beauty advice that too many people have not been given. Your eyebrows are not supposed to match. They should look alike (like sisters) but not identical (like twins). (I suppose your eyebrows could be fraternal twins.) In fact, when you are styling your brows, if you try to make them exact mirror images of each other then neither brow will be able to be the best it can be. This has been my favorite brow advice I’ve ever received and I have really great brows.

Another good one coined by Douglas on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is:

Spray, delay, then walk away.

That’s the correct way to put on perfume or cologne so you don’t overdo it. Spritz into the air above and in front of you, wait a moment for the scent to descend through the air, and then walk through the space you sprayed. Don’t spray directly at skin (or, worse, your clothes) unless its your intention to overpower everyone around you with smell. 

I recently picked up this advice, from a nail tech on Reddit, for keeping your manicure looking better longer and growing your nails out. She was explaining that you should use your fingertips for tasks and not your nails because:

Your nails are jewels, not tools.

This has been tough for me because, let me confess, I open a lot of pop-top cans. But I’m getting there. But I liked the phrase so much I borrowed it for Shelf Life. Here’s the part some of you won’t like.

When you’re writing, remember: Words are tools, not jewels.

Some readers just got big mad.

As writers, I think we probably all like to use beautiful words when we can. There’s a real thrill that comes from having the precise word ready in your mind for a very specific situation—all the right shades and nuances of meaning. The perfect word. And it’s very frustrating when, for instance, an editor or beta reader comes along behind and suggests you change it out for a simpler one. For instance, I used the word “banquette” once in a story for it’s precisely intended purpose, to describe bench seating at a dining table, and my early reader was like “oh my god no one knows this word please just say booth” and now we don’t speak anymore.

Keep that thought handy while I take a detour and then we’ll be back on the main road. In my junior-year high school English class, we had an exercise every time we read a novel for the class to write down ten words from the novel that we didn’t know and that we had to look up, and we were to include their dictionary definition with the word and turn it in. But as a voracious reader at 16 years old, Madame Bovary (grade 9 reading level) and The Crucible (suitable reading for ages 10 and over) simply didn’t have any words in them I didn’t already know. For these exercises I would just write down the longest words I saw and pretend I didn’t know them. Miss, what is ÄR ∙ sə ∙ nik?

The more we read and the older we get—the more time we spend using the language and the more experience we gain with it—the more words we know and the less likely we are to come across a word in running text that we don’t know and, further, can’t figure out from context clues.

This is a good thing. This is what you want. You do not want your reader stopping to go “what the heck is a banquette?” and having to go open up a browser and Google it because every time your reader looks away from your text and at something else, there’s a chance they don’t come back.

But we also want to use our large and impressive writerly vocabulary to supply the most perfect word for each and every sentence, the one with the most precise meaning for the textual situation, even if readers might not know what it means! That’s why we have these words, after all. If there was no slight shade of difference in meaning between a booth and a banquette, there wouldn’t be separate words for them. (In a dining setting, booth describes the whole enclosed seating area, with the seats and the table; banquette describes the upholstered bench seat.)

Who is right: The author writing the story who wishes to use the perfect, correct, esoteric word? Or the reader who wishes to read through the text smoothly, uninterrupted by any words they have to stop and figure out?

Here’s the next thing people reading are not going to like: They are both right. Because two contradictory matters of perspective can both be right or true at the same time. Contradicting facts can’t both be right at the same time. For instance, if my Dad believes that 2 + 2 = 4 and I believe that 2 + 2 = 5, we can’t both be right even if we both have strongly held, heartfelt beliefs. But if a writer believes there’s nothing wrong with using the word banquette in a manuscript and the reader believes they don’t want to deal with a text that has words like banquette in it, they’re both right. There’s not an objective right and wrong.

However: When you write to convey information, meaning, to an audience (of any number of people, from 1 to 7.7 billion), words are tools first and foremost. Aesthetic appeal is a function of language, too, but I argue that it is not the primary function. The primary function is to convey meaning so it is understood—in fact, so that it cannot be misunderstood—by its audience.

I believe that French is a more beautiful and aesthetically appealing language than English but I wouldn’t write a text in French that I intended for an English-speaking audience, because making sure they understand it is more important than making it as beautiful as possible, and also I don’t speak French.

Words are building materials. They’re your bricks and planks and cinderblocks. They’re also your columns, entablature, and arches. They’re also also your mosaic tiles, sculpted moldings, and stained-glass windows. All those things are building materials but their purposes are different.

Materials like planks, bricks, blocks, rebar, pipes, and wiring, are foundational to a building. There’s no room for form (embellishment or decoration, I mean) here; all the available space is reserved for function. You cannot strike a balance here between strength and aesthetics. You have to use the strongest and most stable building materials for your foundation. Otherwise the building’s gonna fall down on someone and you’ll get sued.

Columns, arches, buttresses, and entablature support your building, too, but they’re not the foundational elements. That’s why these elements are decorative within reason. Okay, you can’t make a load-bearing column out of, for instance, glass, even though that would be pretty; the column still needs to hold up your structure and you can’t risk it breaking. But you can make the column decorative to the extent it doesn’t impair the support functionality of the object.

Then you have your finishes, like tilework, friezes, moldings, window glass, paint, and so on. These serve a primarily decorative function and can be chosen solely for their aesthetic value. Now, does the window glass still need to keep out the elements? Yes—it still has to work. You can’t replace the window glass with bubble gum or embroidery floss. But you can choose frosted glass, stained glass, clear glass, tinted glass, leaded glass—whatever is most beautiful and pleasing to you. Likewise, you can’t tile your floor with paper but within the realm of tile you can choose what best pleases.

This is how words work, too. When you are laying the foundation of your story or telling the reader something they must know to follow along, you can’t get fancy and risk your reader not understanding or missing something critical. When you are laying down supporting details and text in your story, you can be a bit fancier and take some risks. You should still take care to be clear and unmistakable and don’t go wild with words, but you can embellish and decorate here to an extent. The finishes in your text, the details that flesh out our mental picture but don’t materially affect plot or character development, you can be as ornamental as you wish.

For instance, if you refer to a character as being “towheaded” there may be some readers who don’t understand that means very light blonde hair. You might have written “platinum blonde” or “light blonde” or “white blonde” if you wanted to make sure there would be, likely, zero readers who come away from that sentence not knowing what the character’s hair color is. However: Does it matter? If a reader is reading along and sees “towheaded” and thinks, “um, I think that means they have purple hair?” and doesn’t check and keeps reading, and they envision this character with purple hair for the rest of the story: So what? 

Character hair color is rarely material to a story. It might matter a lot to you, the author, that the character is blonde because that’s how you pictured them, and maybe in your mind, in this character’s backstory, they’ve heard one too many “dumb blonde” jokes and they’re sick of being underestimated just because they’re blonde and maybe they spent a few semesters in college dying their hair brown and wearing tortoiseshell glasses before finally embracing their blonde hair again and—look, none of that matters. Maybe that’s how you shaped your character but the effects of that shaping must come across in the character’s actions and dialogue. They don’t come across via the hair color.

People are also not going to like that I said the the main character’s appearance is immaterial but that’s just how it is I don’t make the rules.

Perhaps it was wrong to say, “words are tools, not jewels.” Words are tools and jewels, but they are tools first and jewels second. In all of the above types of building materials—foundational, supportive, and decorative—you will note that I specified you still have to use the right material, even for decorative elements. You can’t paint the walls with peanut butter; you still have to use paint. This goes for words, too: No matter how beautiful or cool a word is, do not use it in a place where it does not fit. 

Above any other advice in today’s article is this: If you’re not completely confident about the meaning of a word, including the nuances and connotations, do not use it. Nothing gives a reader that uncomfortable sense that the author threw a dart at an open thesaurus—even if you didn’t!—than an almost-but-not-quite-correctly-used word. Absolutely the worst thing you can do.

Zero stars. Daughter didn’t like.

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