Revising - The Right Word, The Right Sound

 Yes, I knew most of my life about the mot juste. Between Theodore Dreiser and Marcel Proust, I learned somehow about the sound of what I wrote. I do not know that I do either well. KH got a bit irritated because he thought one word was what I should use and to me, it did not sound right.

LitHub's Lucy Sante on Writing with the Back Brain is s succinct discussion of this problem, as well as revising. 

Editing begins with the first sentence, since you cannot proceed to the next without securing the first. (It sometimes takes me a very long time to advance between sentences, but I’ve seldom done more than one draft.) Editing and writing walk together, and they both require the eye and the ear. That first sense alerts you to run-ons, overlaps, problems of logic; the second to the music, which is a lot more than decor. Writing to George Sand in 1876, Gustave Flaubert formulated a credo for prose writers:

When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which is always the only one, and which is also harmonious.

There are two ideas at work here. One of them is the concept of the mot juste, the right word. There are really very few true synonyms; words are highly individuated. “Hate” and “scorn” and “despise” and “execrate” all mean roughly the same thing, but not exactly; only one of them will work in any specific context. The second idea is harder to explain or defend than it is to practice: that the musicality of a phrase is a key to its truth. Flaubert goes on:

Is there not, in this precise fitting-together of parts, something eternal, like a principle? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?

Writing requires the use of the whole mind, both its sober, logical, sequential half and its savage twin: unconscious, instinctive, libidinal, maybe extrasensory. You can write something perfectly decent with only the use of the first, but without the second you will never achieve transcendence.

Think about it, I am constantly.

sch 12/30/22