Choosing a favourite...
...a pointless exercise?
Do you have a favourite place in the world?
I’ve been lucky. Largely thanks to my work, the only continent I’ve never visited - if you exclude both Poles - is South America. I’ve been to most countries in Europe; East, West and Central USA; Africa; India; China; Japan; Australia. Given such vast geographic experience, you might be forgiven for thinking I would struggle to settle on my favourite place in the world.
But not a bit of it. Lucca, in Italy. No contest.
I’ve been to that wonderful old city at least six times, and if I could live anywhere then it would probably be there. But pipe dreams, right?
Choosing ‘favourites’ isn’t always so easy. There was a Substack Note recently whose author was interested in our favourite five bands / musical artists. I identified five pretty quickly - and then remembered all the ones I’d missed out…! “How did I forget them?!”
And what if someone asked you to name your favourite five authors or poets? I know how hard that is because it’s an ‘ice-breaker’ exercise I’ve used when mentoring on writing retreats.
Which got me thinking. As writers, I wondered whether or not there are any ‘favourites’ we might have, conscious or otherwise. And if so, whether they are a help or a hindrance?
You’ll have your own ideas, but here’s a thought or two about favourite formats, styles and words to get you started…
If you’re a poet, do you have a particular format as your default? Sonnets, perhaps; or Haiku, Free Verse, Ballade; or - if you’re a masochist - the Villanelle..!
Is there someone you model yourself on or try to imitate? Eliot or Auden; Motion or Armitage; Milton or Shakespeare…
You could ask similar questions about fiction and plays and so forth.
Such preferences or ambitions are a matter of taste rather than ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; nor do they reflect on mastery of the craft, of course. But one negative ‘favourite’ which I think afflicts all writers is our overuse of ‘go to’ or ‘lazy’ words. These are the words that slip into our sentences when we’re drafting full throttle and don’t have time to pause, think about the mot juste; words like ‘actually’, ‘that’, ‘it’, ‘really’, ‘so’, or perhaps some favourite adjectives…
‘Lazy’ words can creep into our poetry too, either because we like the sound of them or because they represent (for us at least) a core idea, a notion or emotion to which we’re committed. In consequence, sometimes these words - in being nebulous and lacking the concrete - end up being meaningless. When I see ‘soul’ or ‘ocean’, ‘moon’ or ‘love’ (there are dozens of them!) I wonder if the poet hasn’t quite got hold of the reins of their piece. Often such words can prove the harbingers of cliché.
One way to identify ‘lazy’ words in prose is to use a ‘word cloud’. There are free websites and software to be found on the internet in relation to this. You take a chunk or your prose (perhaps a couple or three paragraphs) and paste them into an app’s window; the software then counts the number of times each word appears. After that it plays back what it finds as a ‘cloud’ of words; the more often a word appears in your sample text, the larger it will appear in the ‘cloud’. When you filter out common words like ‘the’, ‘a’ etc. you might be surprised what you find.
There’s nothing wrong with the individual words themselves, of course - how could there be?! - but occasionally it can be good for us to be aware of those we overuse…and then try to rein back on them.
I like writing villanelles, they're fun!😂 Not that mine are good, I just think they're fun to write once you have that couplet....
I've noticed a fixation on certain words...libation (as in a liquid votive offering, if you will), moisture....I think maybe because I live in an arid area where liquid is scarce? I struggle to expand on the what other words to use.
The word cloud is a good idea; I'll try that!