Nearly every writer, I imagine — maybe we can even dispense with the nearly? — has favorite words. It’s certainly true of me. Some of them are words I just like the sound of. Some of them have meanings just too right: I can’t help reaching for those words whenever I set to writing or talking about a favorite topic.When I’m editing something I’ve written, one of the toughest jobs is ridding the text of these pets, which after the second or third occurrence on a page start to jut out at me like snaggleteeth just begging to be attacked by a cosmetic dentist.
But I’ve also got favorite words which I’ve never used. Words which I’ve been hoarding, waiting to be spent at just the right moment, in just the right piece…
This is about one of those words.
I can’t talk about mechanical operations in any way other than the vaguely* allusive. I can change a tire, and I like tinkering with the innards of computers if I don’t have to do it for more than a few minutes — and it’s something I know cold — and I can always manage to feel manly just by doing things like climbing a ladder to replace an outdoor floodlight bulb.
But one thing I can do with the pros: I can turn a knob.
No, no. Not a doorknob. I mean like a dial. Like a radio tuner, say. But not exactly like a radio tuner — that’s not my favorite sort of knob or dial.
To my mind, the problem with knobs like radio tuners is that they turn freely. Between any given setting and the next is an infinite range of other settings. Conceptually, philosophically, I like this freedom. Practically, well, it’s a nuisance. Especially if the readout isn’t digital but just a needle or arrowhead which sorta kinda points to whatever the current setting might be.
No, what I really like is something like the channel selector on an old TV set. If you try to spin a knob like that, you get disaster:
clickclickclickclicktoomanyclickstokeeptrackofclick
Where did you end up? Who knows?
The only way to successfully use such a dial is to apply just the right amount of fingertip pressure, and no more. The objective is to move the dial to each of the discrete settings provided by the manufacturer: Click. Click. Click. Three clicks. Simple, straightforward. And each successful little nudge provides its own small tactile satisfaction. Nuuuuuuudge… click. Like that.
It turns out that there’s a term for each of these individual settings, for each successive tiny trough into which your sensitive fingertip muscles can nudge a tiny boulder. The term is “detent.”
Right. No final “e,” no fancy diacriticals involved. This isn’t (although it’s related to) the diplomatic state which Gorbachev pushed for back in the ’80s — rapprochement between superpowers. This is a detent. (It’s pronounced like something Herve Villechaize, as Tattoo on the Fantasy Island TV series, might say to Fernando Lamas when they found an encampment on the beach: Look, boss: d’tent! d’tent!)
About its etymology, dictionary.com says:
1680–90; [from] French détente, Old French destente, derivative of destendre to relax, equivalent to des– + tendre to stretch
Got that? The tendre on its own means “to stretch.” The des prefix cancels that meaning, making the whole thing “to relax.” Stretch; relax. That’s what you do when you move a knob from one stop to the next. Stretch the finger just a little bit, push… and then stop.
I love that — knowing that human fingertips can somehow sense just the right amount of pressure. I love knowing about detents.
So what’s all this got to do with this Paying Attention to… series of posts, about the process of writing fiction — or at least, about my process? Just this:
Every now and then, in response to some ongoing puzzlement, I come up with some very, very simple gimmick. Maybe I insert a page between two big blocks of chapters, and label it Part 1:, followed by a single word. Maybe I move a paragraph or section from one chapter to a later, and in the process both add suspense to all the intervening chapters, and resolve that suspense at a point which has been crying out for some sort of resolution, any resolution at all…
Whatever the gimmick, whatever the small change in text or structure might be, I can almost hear it audibly: click.
And then I know that setting is complete. Time to move onto the next knob — the first of two remaining — and push at it, too. Just enough, not too much… Every single click, the passing of every single detent, another small but felt cycle of stretch-relax satisfaction.
Writing this draft of this book hasn’t provided just one big surge of relief, or one continuous stream. It’s provided a dozen separate little ones, all along the way — which I would have missed, if I hadn’t been paying attention.
_______________________
* Case in point — “vague” and its derivatives: I had to strike three of them from drafts of this post, leaving (I hope) just this one.
Nance says
I really like this metaphor! Satisfactorily solenoid composition. Maybe that’s what I fear about writing fiction; arguably, I could spin an analog dial and accidentally wind up in the oxygen-deprived stratosphere.
John says
Nance: Yeah… There’s this — maybe psychological jargon? — term, “chunking,” which describes how I like to approach writing fiction. (Well, it seems to be how I do it. Can’t honestly say I “like” it.) The idea is that you set as a goal not a continuous, story-length stream of plot or exposition, but rather a daisy chain of separate packets of accomplishment. Paragraph by paragraph or scene by scene or whatever.
It’s like thinking of creative writing as a wave vs. thinking of it as a particle. The wave theory fits how I read it — oblivious to the components. The particle theory is how I do it.
Looking forward to seeing you try your hand at fiction, you know.
whaddayamean says
I love your note about hording words. I know others ::cough:: who do that. Also, I believe it’s a trait of some authors like Chabon and DFW–how long was Chabon sitting on “exopthalmic” before he used it in MAPS? Because it’s great, and a career can probably only tolerate it once.
fg says
‘Nudge, click,
Like that.’
Two things – one the dial on my new camera has that much of a looser click as to be quite unsatisfactory and now and again (and I think I’m loosing my mind when it happens mid-shoot) the dial moves by itself/by accident to another setting. I am getting used to it but its a mini learning curve when under time pressure.
Second – I have always imagined that Beatrix Potter felt much the same about the word ‘soporific’ and was waiting for its moment to shine in her ‘The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.’
Consequently ‘soporific’ is surely one of the longer and more academic words that generations of very small children know. Used in regard to small sleepy rabbits being naughtily over-full on Mr. McGregor’s lettuce is just, well its divine. A use of word which I think is hard not to enjoy no matter how grown up one has become.
John says
whaddayamean: I never thought of Chabon as a hoarder but that seems to be a perfect example. I couldn’t find it (via Amazon or Google Books) in Maps & Legends, but I did in Kavalier & Clay; the sentence there reads:
Maybe he yielded to temptation and used it twice. :)
I like to think I’ve got a reasonably good vocabulary, but one of the things which frustrated me at first when reading Lolita was how many words I didn’t know. Didn’t know at all. The Kindle has that little “auto-dictionary” built in, of course, so I’d dutifully move the cursor to the trouble spot and… nothing. The built-in dictionary didn’t recognize it either; I’d have to do a regular Web search to find it. Which got real old, real fast.
It wasn’t the first Nabokov I’d read, but I couldn’t remember that feature from any of his other works. So I didn’t think he was just showing off. I eventually decided that although each of these difficult words, as it happened, was perfect for its context (like that “exophthalmic”), it wasn’t Nabokov showing off; it was his narrator, Humbert. (And as it happened, once I stopped looking everything up obsessively, I found I didn’t need to know the exact definition anyway.)
Another word I imagine to be the pet of numerous authors: phthisis. But I’ve seen it used just enough not to give into temptation myself; it’d feel too obviously imitative (if that makes sense).
John says
fg: Ooooh, soporific. That was definitely a pet of mine. I never read Beatrix Potter so I must’ve picked it up somewhere else — maybe from someone else who had read her, ha. It’s a cool word because it actually sounds pleasantly drowsy — all those soft consonants and humming vowels. It practically snores.
But your mentioning it made me worry that I’d used it at least once in the work-in-progress. Whew: nope.
(However, I just found it in the first draft. One character is a retired ex-CEO who goes back to his old corporate headquarters to read a stack of memos and other documents about a particular transaction. After an hour of this, he stretches, yawns, and notes that he’s become “lost in the soporific rhythms of business communication.” Which, er, seems to fit. :))
A dial on a camera like the one you describe would drive me crazy. I’m assuming you mean a shutter-speed dial (like the one in the photo at the top). I guess someone might argue, well, if the camera’s on full-automatic then maybe it “doesn’t make any difference”: it would adjust the aperture to whatever it needed for a given shutter speed. But of course it would make a difference (depth of field being — I think — at least as important as proper lighting).
But, duh, what am I telling YOU for?!?
(Seriously — there’s no way to lock that dial in place???)