How do you bake? How do you write?

We are sitting across from each other at a large table. In front of each of us is the exact same amount of flour, salt, water, and yeast. Maybe one of us gathers fresh herbs and makes a rosemary focaccia. Maybe one of us goes for a longer rise and steams the bread while it bakes to make a crusty artisan bread.

Same ingredients. Different outcome.

This is true for writers. And when I say “writers” I am referring to novelists, short-story writers, playwrights, poets, essayists — the whole gamut of wordsmiths. The words are our tools much as the aforementioned ingredients are used by bakers. How we mix and process is unique and special only to ourselves.

Please note I am not referencing “craft”, which is a vital component in all that we do as creative individuals. Writers and bakers. In this case, I am focused on the methods by which we use these tools.

Take for example dialect. I have read novels by Irvine Welsh written primarily in Scots dialect. It was an amazing experience trying to understand and maintain focus in order to follow the plot. In transforming my mind temporarily I was able to immerse myself in his world. Would it have been different written in a mostly English vocabulary?

There is other types of slang to consider. Whether it is cultural or historic, you have to question how much to use in order to create a real world as well as determine at what point your reader may simply tune out. I salt and pepper my historical crime fiction with just enough to imbue the work in a kind of realistic sensibility.

Some readers are decidedly against curse words. Some writers swear by them. (Did you catch the humor there?)

Those writers who describe scenes and characters in great detail must be aware to use evocative words that have not been bandied about for hundreds of years. Analogies, similes, and metaphors must sound fresh. The latest edition of the Merriam Webster dictionary contains over 470,000 entries. Surely, there must be a new way of describing a person, place, or thing?

And what of the writer of experimental fiction who opts to create words, create portmanteaus, or go wholly off the rails like James Joyce in Finnegans Wake? Joyce spent 17 years on a work of created and combined fables in a kind of deconstructionist setting. Either he would be considered the finest pastry chef in Europe or the guy who put into his cake whatever he had available in his pantry.

Personally, I am fascinated by words, etymologies, spellings, homophones, palindromes, slang, dialect, double entendre — just about anything with the written and spoken language. Reading a poem and listening to it read can create differing emotional impacts. A pause or emphasis in just the right place creates a mood that is indescribable.

Again, this goes beyond craft. I believe in words and understand their power to influence, instill an emotional impact, and cause both alarm and praise. Just as the two of us sitting across from each other, with the same set of ingredients, ready to bring out something hot and fresh from the oven, it is important to focus on the tools, the words, at our disposal.

Make them count.