Word Choice and Inner Listening
A lecture by Frederick
Overview — 0:01:15
The topic tonight is word choice—primarily in the context of poetry, though the principles extend equally to prose. The session grew out of a poem shared at a Friday write-in by a participant named Edna, whose word choices prompted Frederick to try to articulate what exactly made them so good. That articulation became the lecture.
Two things are worth naming from the outset: the session is less about rules and more about a way of listening—to connotation, to freshness, to the place in a poem where language is doing real work versus just filling space. And unusually for a craft session, a substantial portion was live collaborative writing: the group tried exercises together in real time.
Edna’s Poem — 0:03:12
Read at the start of the session as the example that prompted the whole discussion:
I thought I’d never forget him the way he held me like a flame cupped in trembling hands, bright, dangerous, almost holy. I burn for him, like summer burns for the sun— too much, too fast, too close. But now his name returns slowly like a scent. I once knew his voice is sound. I almost recognize his face blurred at the edges. How did I lose something that once felt carved into me? How did forgetting happened? So quietly, so kindly. I remember sleeping beside absence, talking to shadows, wearing grief, like skin, and still I let go. Time did what I swore it couldn’t. It softened the sharp things, turned ruin into routine, and left only a trace, a rustle of leaves, a street we walked once, a laugh I didn’t know I’d lost. I wonder now how forgetting found me, and why it didn’t ask.
Written in approximately forty minutes and shared the following morning. Edna’s voice when she reads her own work is itself a musical instrument, Frederick noted—but even on the page, certain moments leap.
The lines that struck him most: like a flame cupped in trembling hands; his face blurred at the edges; and especially the cluster sleeping beside absence, talking to shadows, wearing grief like skin.
The Picasso Line — 0:05:34
Frederick’s analogy for what these phrases have in common: standing close to one of Picasso’s small dinner sketches—the kind he dashed off for a restaurant tab—the line is completely assured. Not overworked, not tentative. A nose drawn in one fluid stroke; a dress in a longer one. Not too much, not too little. Just so.
These phrases share that quality. They aren’t always short: like a flame cupped in trembling hands is quite long. But there isn’t a word you’d change. And they tend toward brevity in the sense that they stop exactly where the meaning completes.
The test: add a word to each. Sleeping beside lonely absence. Talking to ineffable shadows. Wearing grief like a heavy second skin. Each addition diminishes the line. The imagination, which had room to complete the image in its own way, is now crowded.
The principle at work: a phrase only needs to establish the resonance—the correspondence between image and meaning—and then stop. The reader’s imagination does the rest. Wearing grief like skin is powerful precisely because it doesn’t specify which skin, how thick, what color, whether it’s a second skin or your only one. Each reader feels a different skin. The phrase opens; it doesn’t close.
Connotation — 0:17:07
The underlying mechanism is connotation. Every word carries more than its dictionary definition—it carries a field of associations, impressions, cultural resonances that precede conscious understanding. The wonder of literature, as Frederick put it, is that we get it before we get it.
Mint, as an example: the literal meaning is the plant. The connotations include freshness, cleanliness, nature, the islands of Greece, toothpaste, a certain springiness, delight. If your nephew has all those qualities—my nephew is a sprig of mint—you’ve said something quite true about him, and readers receive it in their nervous systems before they’ve processed it analytically.
This is how connotation does the work of concision: if you identify the exact correspondence—the specific quality of guilt that resembles a coat, the specific quality of forgetting that resembles a shadow—and say only that, you don’t need to fill in the rest. The connotation carries it. The reader doesn’t need talking to black sooted shadows from a Victorian furnace. Shadows are already present-but-ungrabable, haunting but unkillable. That’s exactly the phenomenology of loss. The word does its job.
The opposite mistake: reaching for a familiar image because it feels safe. It hit her like a punch in the gut is accurate—bad news really does feel like that—but it’s been so thoroughly traveled that the reader glides over it without registering anything. You lose the chance to give them a genuinely new experience. This is distinct from cliché (though related to it); it’s the less surprising image chosen from the shelf rather than found by actually feeling the question.
Freshness and the Ski Mountain — 0:11:45
The freshness principle: there are well-worn runs down a ski mountain—they exist because they’re the natural ways down, the routes that make sense. There’s nothing wrong with them. But fresh powder is only possible where others haven’t been. Writing the expected image—the inky night—is like taking a packed run. Writing the image that comes from actually sitting with the question—what is this particular night like, what specific quality of it am I trying to convey?—is like skiing territory no one else has tracked.
The night was like velvet (if it’s a warm summer night you’re being wrapped by) or kitchen knives (if it’s a cutting cold night you’re lost in)—these are more surprising not because they’re trying to be surprising, but because they arise from actually feeling the question. Freshness isn’t a goal in itself; it’s a byproduct of going inward rather than reaching for what’s at hand.
Carol’s formulation: using a familiar phrase is almost a gimmick to make sure readers understand what you’re saying—and in doing so, you cheat yourself. The work of saying what you mean is what generates the specific and surprising phrase. When you take the shortcut, you skip the work that would have yielded the discovery. Seeing the soft running lights of fishermen is a specific phrase from a poem Carol had heard in a master’s program; she’s never forgotten it. It could only have been written by someone who stopped at the image and stayed with it.
Workshop: The Brussels Sprouts Poem — 0:25:30
Frederick shared a short poem he wrote in his twenties, dug up specifically for this session, offering it as a live example of identifying where word choice works and where it needs more attention. He is, he noted, unattached to whether it’s any good.
Original version:
I love Brussels sprouts. I thought and felt a rushing wave of kindness whose origin and destination I was.
The backstory: he was in graduate school, making Brussels sprouts, and was caught off guard by how happy he was about it. A moment of innocent self-regard—I like things, I know what I like, there’s something lovable about that. The poem is an attempt to catch that flash of self-love.
What’s working: the first line is charming and specific in its simplicity; the idea in the last line—being simultaneously origin and destination of a wave of kindness, giver and recipient—is genuinely interesting. A participant’s observation: I love Brussels sprouts / I thought might be redundant (the italics already mark it as a thought), and the I thought takes up space without adding meaning.
What needs work: rushing wave of kindness—familiar enough to feel slightly pre-owned, though not quite a cliché. More problematic: origin and destination—two long Latinate words that are purely informational, abstract, and break the meter. They function as logistics, not image. Carol called this exactly: the first two lines work together; the second two sound pedantic.
The live revision explored several directions:
— Whose crest, whose ocean, and whose shore I was — carries the wave image forward rather than abandoning it for dry terminology; extends the metaphor instead of pivoting to information. Frederick preferred this.
— And felt a rushing kindness — collapsing adjective-noun into noun-used-as-noun, which tightens without losing the meaning. A crunch of cars as an analogy: crunch is technically a noun, but it’s doing unusual noun work; the compactness is part of the power. A rushing kindness operates similarly.
— Terminus — keeps the meter but brings connotations of death, ancient Rome, and the Terminator. Clearly wrong.
One participant’s suggestion: the whole poem might want to be longer, to make the experience of that self-love clearer. Frederick agreed this is a persistent challenge in his own poetry—tending toward brevity to the point of opacity, producing work that’s lovely but anonymous, like a nicely rendered photograph with no photographer visible.
On the Thesaurus — 0:45:38
A lively tangent on the thesaurus—generally beloved in the group. Two positions emerged, both valid:
The thesaurus as a field of options to explore: Laurel described spiraling through it for hours from a single word, finding images that put a twist on the original. Andrea uses it constantly, always looking for a word with the right feeling and rhythm.
Frederick’s caution: the thesaurus is useful for reminding you of words you’d never remember on your own, and for opening up options—but the next step has to be going back inward. Looking up synonyms for rushing and finding plunge or whisk is useful, and whisk in particular made him want to invent a word: wish of kindness. But if you simply pick the closest option from the list without checking whether it’s true—whether it’s your word for the feeling—you risk ending up with Terminus or with the Joey Tribbiani problem (the Friends episode where he runs every word through a thesaurus and produces nonsense). The thesaurus is a menu; you still have to feel which dish is the right one.
Carol’s pedagogical framing from teaching college writing: expand, then contract. The Brussels sprouts poem may need to say more before it says less—develop what the experience was before compressing it into four lines. Concision is the last step, not the first.
Exercises: What Does Your Hand Feel Like to the Touch? — 0:53:44
The group gathered immediate observations from touching their own hands:
Raw pasta dough (Frederick’s first impression): disgusting, homey, cool, moist, with clots in it—possibility and potential, but also slightly off-putting. Connotations run in multiple directions at once.
Cold little bones, like a dead bird (from Laurel): immediately striking, and produced genuine enthusiasm from the group. The little cold little bones detail refines it further. Connotations: frailty, vulnerability, muted, discarded, cold. Loss. If you’re writing a character who’s alone in a New York City apartment in winter, describing her hands this way tells you nearly everything you need to know about her.
Rough, like sandpaper (Andrea): sandpaper is accurate but well-established as the archetype of rough. The group worked toward something more specific—the roughness of a wash rag that’s been air-dried rather than tumbled, with its little knobbly stiffened parts. Connotations: hard work, practical, wrung out, working class, resilient. Hands rough like a wash rag belong to someone who does things.
Soft, like a hairless cat (Carolyn, after reflection): immediately strange and slightly disquieting—the softness that’s wrong because you expect fur and instead get clammy skin. Bond villain. Naked, nude, vulnerable in an unsettling way. Frederick suggested: his hands were soft, like a hairless cat—perfect for a villain character who’s never done manual labor, who lives on others’ work. The connotations do the characterization.
The pedagogical point of the exercise: the same adjective—rough, smooth, cold, soft—can be specified by a dozen different images, and each image carries a different cluster of associations. Rough like sandpaper is not the same sentence as rough like a wash rag; they describe different roughnesses and different people. The job is to identify which correspondence is actually true, and then say that one.
What It’s Like to Breathe — 1:06:44
A second exercise: describe breathing. Again the group generated images:
A bellows, a grandfather clock—rhythm and regular mechanism, though the grandfather clock is slightly ornate. Frederick proposed an empty swing as a way to get at the pendulum quality without the clutter: less expected, and a swing already carries softness and childhood and a back-and-forth that breathing actually has.
Gentle, like lace curtains—from the chat. The group loved this immediately. Frederick noted: lace curtains blowing in the wind are almost literally lungs.
Breath, like the tide—in and out, cyclic, soothing, hypnotic, natural. Lovely. Also ocean swells (same connotations, slightly different emphasis on the bigness and the impersonality of it).
Breath as something you forget until it’s taken away (a participant’s memory of falling, having the air knocked out): the idea that breath is noticed mostly in its absence, like parking—you never think about it until it’s gone.
Floating on your back in water (Laurel): the body rising and falling with the breath, the involuntary quality of it, the surrender.
A participant: gentle, like lace curtains, but breathing is freeing—like taking off a tight shoe. Another: a yoga group thinks it’s quiet. Not with all that inhaling and exhaling going on. Unexpected and true.
The exercise demonstrated in real time what the whole session was pointing toward: when you actually feel the question rather than reaching for the nearest answer, what comes is surprising even to you. Cold little bones, like a dead bird is not something you’d think your way to. It arrives because someone touched their hand, stayed with the sensation, and let what came come without filtering it.
Inner Listening — 1:28:05
The closing synthesis: there are two modes of word-finding. One is analytical—identifying what you need, reviewing options, selecting the closest fit. This produces competent writing and is useful, especially in revision. But the deeper source of striking images is something else: a kind of listening inward, letting language arrive from a place that is faster and less managed than conscious thought.
Laurel described it: she often gets a phrase while staring out a window. It comes. That phrase usually stays in the poem; the rest gets built around it. And then for the rest of the poem, there’s more deliberate work—reworking, revising, pulling things toward that original arrived image.
Carol: suspending judgment on yourself is what allows it. Not filtering prematurely. Honoring the thought that comes, even if it seems macabre or strange.
Frederick: you can often tell, reading a poem, which line arrived as a gift and which lines were filled in around it. Sometimes you can work your way back to that open receiving state even in the middle of a formal constraint—even with two lines left in a five-line stanza and a rhyme scheme to satisfy. The more you can approach those remaining lines with the same innocence as the first arrived image, the more the poem feels like it came forth rather than was assembled from parts. It has a little to do with suspending the anxiety of completion—is this getting where I needed to go?—and going back to the well simply, openly, without knowing what you’ll find.
What the exercises showed is that this mode is accessible. Touch your hand. Ask what it feels like. Let what comes come. Don’t argue with it. Check the connotations to make sure you want what it carries. And then, when you’ve found the word or phrase that carries exactly the right resonance—no more, no less—stop there, and let the reader do the rest.
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