Language Bending for Fun and Profit

Discussion notes

I’ve grouped the conversation by theme. What people said is paraphrased, names are left out, and personal stories are kept general.

Concrete language and physical experience

We started with the relationship between subjects and actions in a sentence.

When you revise, look at how many words sit between a noun and its verb. Bringing the subject and action closer together can make a sentence more immediate and easier to follow.

Some related questions:

• Where is the speaker or main character?
• What are they doing?
• Does the verb describe a specific action?
• Can an abstract feeling be rendered through physical experience?

“Feel” came up as a verb that can leave too much unspecified. Naming anger tells the reader something, but locating its expression in a dry mouth, a constricted throat, or another bodily response gives the experience greater specificity.

This is a revision practice, for after a draft exists, so that close attention to individual sentences doesn’t get in the way of the first writing.

Rhythm, white space, and the boundaries between forms

An audience question concerned prose that feels like poetry through its rhythm, sentence lengths, and arrangement on the page.

We talked about how hard it is to draw firm boundaries between prose poetry, flash fiction, and lyrical prose. A short work might contain narrative movement while also relying heavily on sound, repetition, or compression.

People described writers disagreeing about how to classify these pieces, which suggests the categories don’t always capture what the writing is doing.

We also talked about genre labels as tools of publishing and marketing. A work can succeed artistically while creating practical difficulties for people trying to describe, position, or sell it.

Page design and publishing practicalities

The appearance of a page does not always arise solely from the writer’s formal intentions.

White space, line breaks, illustrations, and page layout may also reflect decisions involving designers, publishers, production budgets, and the length of the finished book.

More space can mean more pages, with consequences for cost.

Both things are true: visual arrangement can carry artistic meaning, and the published object also comes out of practical production decisions.

Outlining, discovery, and surprise

Asked whether poets and flash fiction writers outline, people described different approaches across forms.

One account contrasted exploratory poetry with screenwriting. A screenplay developed without sufficient planning had produced individually interesting scenes but lacked overall momentum. Screenwriting’s formal and production demands made structure particularly important.

Poetry offered more room to proceed without a predetermined destination. Surprise could occur almost word by word, with the writer discovering relationships through the act of composition.

Flash fiction was similarly described as beginning with a promising sentence and following it into the next. The idea did not necessarily exist fully before the writing began.

Longer fiction could require structural planning either before drafting or afterward, when the writer needed to organize what had emerged.

How much planning is useful?

We also talked about the risk of outlining in too much detail.

For some writers, an exhaustive outline can make a story feel psychologically finished before it has been written. The sense of discovery disappears, reducing the impulse to continue.

The practical challenge is to find enough structure to support the work while retaining something worth discovering.

Formal poetry complicated the distinction between planning and exploration. A sonnet, villanelle, or sestina already supplies requirements that function as a kind of outline. The writer works toward particular formal expectations while discovering what can happen within them.

Finding a workable balance takes practice and experimentation.

Original phrasing and familiar language

An online question asked how much novelists and short story writers should pursue original phrasing rather than familiar expressions.

Nobody offered a formula. The answers came back to intention and effect: what should a phrase make possible in this particular passage?

One example involved replacing a stock comparison with an exaggerated, unexpected alternative. Even an initially awkward invention could create energy and open a path beyond habitual language.

We connected originality with the sense that language is alive. An analogy from acting suggested that a performance becomes compelling when a character seems capable of doing something unexpected, rather than merely delivering predetermined lines.

Writing can create a similar impression of possibility through its movement, rhythm, and choices.

Language as material

We kept coming back to language as material you can work with.

That points you toward questions like:

• What are the words doing?
• How do their sounds interact?
• What changes through repetition?
• How does syntax create movement or resistance?
• What happens when a familiar arrangement is disrupted?

One participant described finding this approach useful when difficult personal material resisted a more direct treatment. Carefully structured repetition offered another way into the work.

This is craft: you can choose and handle techniques the way other makers choose tools and materials.

Hearing language differently

We talked about sound as a way of making familiar language unfamiliar again.

A writer rereading their own work may move too quickly because the words and intended meanings are already known. Listening to the passage as music can reveal qualities that ordinary rereading overlooks.

This can involve temporarily setting aside interpretation and attending to rhythm, texture, repetition, and the relationships between words.

It can also loosen premature self-censorship. Listening may help a writer follow a possibility before the critical part of the mind dismisses it.

Reading unfamiliar work

Several people recommended books that unsettle your expectations at first.

One example described beginning a novel with uncertainty about its language and gradually learning how to read it. What first felt unfamiliar became compelling once its patterns began to register.

Give yourself time for that adjustment.

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons prompted a related conversation about approaching writing through sound and visual art. Cubist painting was offered as a useful comparison for language that rearranges expected relationships and perspectives.

These give you other ways to read when a sentence doesn’t follow a familiar explanatory sequence.

Making characters sound different

An audience question asked how writers distinguish characters through language.

The answers started with understanding the characters themselves: their desires, secrets, vulnerabilities, histories, and ways of reacting.

Differences in speech can develop from these underlying pressures. A character’s language becomes more convincing when the writer understands what that person wants and what they are trying to conceal.

We spent particular time on the gap between what a character says and what they think. Giving readers access to something other characters do not know can establish intimacy and connection.

Interiority and the balance of a scene

One practical exercise involved identifying four elements within a scene:

• Interior thought.
• Dialogue.
• Physical action.
• Imagery.

Highlighting each element can help a writer see the scene’s balance and notice what may be absent.

Use it to diagnose a scene. Different scenes need different proportions, but making the elements visible can reveal an overreliance on one mode.

Character biography, objectives, and secrets

A perspective from screenwriting and directing emphasized extensive character preparation.

Biographical notes could include family relationships, formative experiences, and details that explain a character’s behaviour. Actors’ questions about motivation made this preparation particularly useful.

We also talked about objectives: what does each character want in a scene?

Secrets add another dimension. What someone withholds, who else knows it, and what they do to protect it can shape both dialogue and action.

Differences in resilience also matter. Characters vary in how much discomfort they tolerate, when they withdraw, and what makes them persist.

Status and shifting power

Status came up as another way to examine a scene.

Here, status meant relative power within an interaction, rather than simply wealth or social position. A character may enter a room with authority and lose it as the exchange develops.

Tracking these shifts can help reveal movement within a scene.

Some questions to ask:

• Who has the advantage at the beginning?
• What gives them that advantage?
• Does the balance change?
• What tactics does each person use to get what they want?

Tactics we talked about included flattery, apparent weakness, concealment and direct confrontation.

This is especially useful in dramatic writing, though conflict doesn’t need to govern every kind of literary work.

Listening to speech and reading aloud

We also came back to the differences you can hear between people speaking in the same room.

Shared subject matter does not produce identical speech. People differ in pacing, gesture, hesitation, sentence length, and emphasis.

A nervous character might speak in fragments. Another might use long, flowing sentences. These patterns can help distinguish voices during revision.

Reading your work aloud is a practical way to hear whether those differences are there.

Voice, tone, and setting

Asked how much voice, tone, and tense are known before drafting, people described very different starting points.

One approach began with characters, whose voices developed intuitively through writing. A recognizable authorial tone emerged through continued practice, although a particular assignment could also prompt a deliberate change toward joy, warmth, or community.

Another approach began with setting and world-building. Weather provided a way into place, atmosphere, and the conditions under which characters live.

For a large imagined world, establishing where the story happens could precede populating it with characters.

Where you start can shape the language and tone of a project.

Recognizable voice and creative confinement

One person questioned the pressure on new writers to “find their voice.”

Their alternative was to experiment widely and let patterns show up over time.

A recognizable style can help readers and publishers identify a writer’s work. It can also create expectations that the next book will resemble the previous one.

Examples from writing, painting, and performance illustrated how a successful approach can become confining when an audience or market keeps asking for it.

You can change styles, cross genres and let each project sound different.

Breaking linguistic habits

Asked for exercises to escape a rut, people suggested deliberately interrupting familiar methods.

I described consulting Oblique Strategies: prompts used to introduce an unexpected direction when habitual problem-solving stops producing progress.

Other exercises included:

• Treating the page as an open field and scattering language across it.
• Removing prepositions from an existing passage.
• Alternating short, declarative sentences with longer, more fluid ones.
• Writing a story using only one-syllable words.
• Introducing another arbitrary restriction.

These exercises are meant to unsettle habits and open up possibilities. What you write doesn’t have to become finished work.

One example concerned feedback that a writer’s sentences were consistently smooth. The advice was to roughen the music occasionally, because repeatedly relying on a strength could make the writing predictable.

Copying admired work as practice

Another exercise involved typing out a story or poem by an admired writer whose style differs from one’s own.

The comparison was to learning an instrument by reproducing a passage of music.

Physically following another writer’s sentences can bring attention to pacing, syntax, and choices that reading alone may not reveal. The exercise offers a way to experience unfamiliar habits from inside the act of writing.

Play, humour, and revenge haiku

“Revenge haiku” came up as a deliberately playful answer to writer’s block.

The exercise combined a comic premise with a syllabic constraint. Counting and shaping the lines gave the writer a concrete task, reducing the pressure to produce important or serious work.

People connected its usefulness with rhythm, compression, and a turn near the end.

The humour also mattered. Beginning with something silly could make writing approachable again and lead into other material.

Physical movement came up too: standing up, moving around and changing position can interrupt whatever got you stuck.

Constraints as a generative practice

A final exchange confirmed that participants used constraints in their own work as well as in teaching.

Traditional forms are one source of constraints, and we also talked about Oulipo and its interest in generating literature through formal restrictions.

The broader idea is that a difficult rule can supply a starting point when a writer does not know what to write about. Solving the formal problem may generate content, associations, and unexpected decisions.

Constraints can work across art forms and everyday activities. Limiting the available materials can create a problem worth working on.

Reading recommendations mentioned

Books and writers people recommended:

• Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow.
• Claudia Rankine, particularly Citizen.
• Daphne Marlatt, Steveston.
• Fred Wah, Diamond Grill.
• Wayde Compton, 49th Parallel Psalm.
• Ian Williams, Reproduction.
• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons.
• Roberto Bolaño, particularly The Savage Detectives.
• W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn.
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other.

These came up in our conversations about rhythm, hybrid forms, unconventional syntax, dialogue, and ways of expanding your sense of what language can do.