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Agency for Literary Review

The Tools You Need

Consider a painter of landscapes for the moment.  There are many tools he can do without but there are some he must have.  He cannot paint without brushes of different types and styles.  He generally needs an easel and a palette and palette knives.  He needs paints and charcoals to draw his sketches.  He needs a studio and storage space to finish his works.  With tools, he is now a painter.  Being a good landscape artist with commercial viability though, depends on skill and technique. A writer is no different an artist.  

Let’s examine some of your essential tools.

    A dictionary and thesaurus of good quality are not things you can do without.  You will be quite surprised at how many times you incorrectly use a word that you thought you knew the meaning of perfectly well.  There are many good dictionaries that will install on your computer and you should have at least one.  But you also need to have one handy on a table. The disadvantage to the electronic dictionary is that it will only show you the meaning of the word that you have called up on the screen.  When you look up the definition of the word in a conventional dictionary, you cannot avoid seeing other words, together with their meaning.  You may find that you spend more time browsing the conventional dictionary than you do playing solitaire on your computer. 

You should do the following as well.  Every so often, open the front of the dictionary and read all of those pages that explain how to use it and how to use the phonetics.  The use of phonetics (the correct pronunciation) will often lend itself to a particular cadence that you can use to your advantage in dialogue.  If you characterise someone as unkempt, dishevelled and of gruff manner it will not ring true if the words you make him speak are mellifluous and melodious.

Nor must you attempt to do without a good thesaurus.  If you have been schooled in writing then you will already sing its praises.  If you think its only value is to give you the choice of a different word then you need to learn how to use one correctly.  

A thesaurus is a dictionary.  Instead of giving you the meaning and etymology of words it gives you other words that mean the same (synonym).  The words that you use to portray a character in your story may not be the most apt words.  In fact, though the words you chose seem exact, your reader might get a different impression from them.  The word, gruff, was mentioned earlier.  A dictionary definition suggests terms like rough, curt, surly and sour of manner.  That is pretty much what we had in mind.  But see how a thesaurus handles the word.  It lists bad-tempered, grumpy, crotchety, curt, stern, crusty and brusque. Our use of the word, gruff, may well have been meant to imply laconic or taciturn, which is slightly off the mark.  

The thesaurus list of synonyms gives us clues to where the accepted usage of the word is heading.  It also gives the antonym, the opposite to the word.  It states what the word doesn’t imply.  Words are your tools.  And yes, if you read through your narrative and find that you used the same word just too many times in the one paragraph, the thesaurus will give you a nice alternate.

If you have just muttered something like, so what, then you need to understand that words are your paintbrushes.  The painter uses different brushes to create his different strokes, different patterns, different illusions and different textures.  It is the brushstroke that defines the painting and adds a sense of story to it.  A painter must master his tools to recreate on the canvas what he sees in his mind.  You need to master the tool of words to weave your story to make your readers believe in it.  Words are your tools.

Consider these two sentences.  They each tell the same thing; that a wind is blowing on a woman's face.  But using words to paint contrasting brushstrokes produces antithetical views.

A breeze, as insubstantial as summer gossamer, silently blew butterfly kisses to caress her sun-warmed cheek.

A brittle wind, as solid as winter ice, keened as it reached with icy claws to chafe and chap her already frozen face.

    Reference dictionaries exist for everything you can think of.  You will use them rarely but when you need them, they will be worth every penny spent on them.  Dictionaries of medical terms and legal terms will be useful in almost every story you write.  Even something as odd as a dictionary of nursery rhymes will provide you with a great deal of understanding of politics in early years.  Spend a lot of time browsing these books; you will not regret it.  

They can be expensive so do spend a lot of time in second-hand bookstores.  You will be rewarded.  Look for old almanacs and manuals and travel books (I mean old) and picture books of places and towns.  Buy some novels written fifty and sixty and eighty years ago.  These provide you not only with a sense of the style of writing and speaking then, but also things that were topics of the day.  Stories that you place into those dates (some character’s father or grandfather, perhaps) must have the feeling for the history of those days. 

Research is paramount for story writing.  Consider a story that detailed a soldier in the Second World War giving another soldier mouth-to-mouth (CPR) resuscitation after he drowned when the weight of his pack dragged him under water.  That procedure hadn’t come into general practice, and wouldn’t for several years after.  A look at a first-aid manual of the time would have been invaluable.  Research is everything.  Moreover, old books, training manuals, journals and even an old atlas can suggest ideas for plots.  

Browsing such things give you snippets of insight that will flesh out your story and give a point of interest to your reader.  Have you ever wondered why an atlas is called an atlas?  The Titan, Atlas, in Greek mythology, supported the pillars of the universe.  He is usually depicted holding the world on his back (having been tricked into it by Heracles).  Books, holding collections of maps of the world, frequently used this depiction on the cover; hence the book became known as an atlas.

    Reference books on grammar and punctuation that give correct and incorrect usage are invaluable.  Perhaps you are so literate that you have already noted the 37 grammatical errors I have committed in these pages thus far, but if you haven’t, then buy yourself one or two.  Sometimes you will write something that just doesn’t feel right.  You can reference the construction and determine if you erred or just wrote a sloppy sentence.  All writers (I suspect) do both.  Another problem facing a mature person is that times and rules change.  That which was anathema, like placing a preposition at the end of a sentence, may well be an accepted style in our ever-evolving language.  

    A reference library with a good selection of material is also invaluable.  With luck, you will have such a library close to hand.  Otherwise you can access reference libraries on the Web though you may have to subscribe to some of them.  If you are not lucky enough to have a good reference library close by, then maybe the reference section of your public (or a school) library has a useful reference section.  Learn to take advantage of it.  Learn to make use of it.  Learn to find the information you are looking for.     

   A pack of lined 3 X 5 cards from your preferred stationer.  We will explain their use later.