Giveaway Words

[Paul Whybrow]

We've previously discussed The Bestseller Code, on the Colony.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bestseller-Code-Anatomy-Blockbuster-Novel/dp/1250088755

This book describes how the texts of best-selling novels were analysed by computers to identify commonalities, which might have contributed to their success. Such mining of data is thought-provoking, as well as deeply tedious and, after I read it, I was left wondering how I could ever apply the findings. The main thing I recall about it, is that best-selling books use contractions more than books with average sales. Seemingly, readers prefer 'I'd' to 'I would'.

Also, bestsellers have plots that emphasise relationships, as readers like to bond with the characters.

The algorithm used to analyse a novel assessed 280,000 data points, of which 2,800 were considered to be crucial in identifying whether a story would be successful. Word usage can identify an author. Word choice has a powerful effect on a reader, and in writing my WIP, I found myself considering how I have giveaway words, that I repeatedly use. As I write crime stories, there are bound to be multiple examples of words such as murder, victim, blood, suspicion and autopsy, but other nouns, verbs and expressions regularly make an appearance, such as:

Brambles (there are a lot of blackberry bushes in Cornwall), Yowling (angry cats), Narrowing (options and the country lanes), Scramble (up cliffs and through rough countryside), Gales (it's often windy), Waterproofs and Wellingtons (it rains a lot here), Seagulls, Owls, Foxes and Badgers (I always include wild animals, sometimes as symbols), Glared (my detective protagonist is slow to anger, but has an unblinking stare), Jagged (the granite geology is), Pastie (the traditional Cornish filled pastry—it's compulsory to eat one a week, or they deport you to England! )

I also have my protagonist use several catchphrases, which would serve as identifiers that it's my work: "We do what we can", "On with the show" and "I don't know what we've got yet."

Do you use words repeatedly, which have become a part of your writer's voice?

Do your characters have catchphrases?

 

[Amber]

Damn computers. What do they know?

....and no, not my writing voice.

But yes, sort of. Sometimes certain words or phrases become part of something I'm writing or how my characters speak.

 

[MaryA]

One exercise I come back to again and again is a little 'touchstone' glossary for each writing project. This is a jump-start that helps me with tone or 'voice', the distinctive speech rhythms of each character in dialogue or narrative. It also gives me a way to 'build' a world of place, time, context. I also pop in lines from song lyrics, and poems, quotations, sketches, play with colour, puns and invent words at times. I don't know quite why it gets juices going as a 'pre-writing' game but I've done it for years.

So I created a word bubble for a short story:

deep topography, portals, sunlit cumulus, 'quantum black holes proliferated', 'turn around, look at me/someone walking beside you', little butterball, the old reified Anthropocene, flashpoint, Mrs Doodlebug, chanting walkers wild heart lost chord, Why not? Tell me why the hell not?, a deadly heft of light flattening out streets and farmland, her voice murmuring in the tunnel, on either side/ the river/ lie, ochre, sienna, burnt orange, cadmium yellow, aquamarine, the immensity of sky over the desert, the empty well, the grip of a hand, eyes squinting against the glare, a dessicated mummified ossified bloodless corpse...

And then it all changes, of course, the minute I begin writing.

 

[Louise]

I now have a vision Mary of a cadmium yellow little butterball sitting next to a dedicated mummified ossified bloodless corpse. Just the thing to start the week!

I like to think my characters have their own vocabulary. Even in children’s picture books I think voices can be differentiated. When I think how my four year old talks it’s very different to some of his friends. But it’s harder to portray eccentric kids with a wide vocabulary because you get people saying ‘would a five year old really say that?’.

My favourite voice is my sea monster. He’s very shouty and a bit of a public nuisance so he uses A LOT OF IRRITATING CAPITALS AND LOOOOONG VOWELS! I wasn’t sure agents would like that but he’s the character on whom I’ve had most positive feedback too.

 

[Alistair Roberts]

Deported to England? That's worse than getting deported to Oz! Trouble is a pastie here even at the supermarket costs about $2.30 each! I could be in trouble. Relationships in novels between characters makes perfect sense though.

 

[Howard]

Word usage, in and of itself, doesn't grab me, so I find it hard to put much credence in the claims of this study.
Phraseology, however is a different thing. A well turned phrase, be it lyrical, humorous or just somehow beautiful in its craftsmanship, can be a powerful draw. I have often found myself hooked by an author not because of their subject or characters, but because of the way they use words. Alistair Reynolds springs to mind there, as (and I've said this here before) while I rarely care for his plots and I physically dread the end of his books (they are always awful), his ability as a wordsmith is unmatched.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

I now have a vision Mary of a cadmium yellow little butterball sitting next to a dedicated mummified ossified bloodless corpse. Just the thing to start the week!

I like to think my characters have their own vocabulary. Even in children’s picture books I think voices can be differentiated. When I think how my four year old talks it’s very different to some of his friends. But it’s harder to portray eccentric kids with a wide vocabulary because you get people saying ‘would a five year old really say that?’.

My favourite voice is my sea monster. He’s very shouty and a bit of a public nuisance so he uses A LOT OF IRRITATING CAPITALS AND LOOOOONG VOWELS! I wasn’t sure agents would like that but he’s the character on whom I’ve had most positive feedback too.

I have a character who speaks with exclamation marks! Readers get it, but the editor always takes them all out...and I put them back in It's the way he talks, and his dialogue doesn't read right without them.

I write a wide range of stuff, so there are few words that span all my writing. Probably the most diagnostic words in my MG novels are dragon swear words.

 

[Louise]

I love the idea of dragon swear words!