We all know that words are made up of letters. But I think we sometimes forget that they’re also made up of sounds. Let’s look at those sounds and why they matter. (Special thanks to Darcy Pattison, who first introduced me to the way sounds help create meaning.)

Today, we start with vowels. In English there are five vowels, right? A, e, i, o, and u.

Well, yes and no. There are five vowel letters. But in most English dialects there are 15 distinct vowel sounds. (The following list is entirely Kimberlee-centric; I included only those vowel sounds that I could distinguish as separate sounds, which is why only 13 are listed—I hear no difference in the sounds of “the” and “but” or of “cause” and “cop.” If you do, by all means, stick them back in!)

High Energy Vowels

• long e (as in tree)
• short i (as in sit)
• long a (as in say)

These are high sounds, spoken in the top of the mouth, with the face pulled taut. Try it. Say those sounds. Feel where they are in your mouth, what your face does as you say them. Feel their energy.

Midrange Vowels

• long i (as in glide)
• short e (pen)
• short a (cat)
• oi (toy)
• ow (cow)

These sounds are spoken in the middle of the mouth, with the face more relaxed. Go ahead. Say them. Feel where they are in your mouth, how your face relaxes as you go down that list.

Low Energy Vowels

• short o (cop)
• short u (but)
• long o (bone)
• short oo (book)
• long oo (tooth)

These are low sounds, spoken in the bottom of the mouth with the face relaxed. One more time. Say them. Feel them in your mouth, your face.

Okay, so this is all very interesting (okay, so it’s only interesting if you’re a total word nerd like me, but I’ll assume if you’re reading this that you, in fact, are), but who cares? How does it affect one’s writing?

Let’s look at how knowing about vowel sounds and their effects on our physiology (and thus our psychology) can make our writing stronger. Here’s the original version of the first sentence of chapter four of my novel:

The autumn I was seventeen, the nightmares were particularly frequent.

This sentence starts off an intense chapter, in which the narrator is nearly scared out of her mind—but though the sentence tells us a few things (the narrator’s age, the time of year, and that she’s suffering from bad dreams), it’s not, ahem, particularly compelling.

So, I decided to use these vowel sounds to revise it. I wanted to use as many high energy vowels as I could. Right away that got rid of every word but seventeen and frequent.

Now, the most important word in the sentence is nightmare, but it doesn’t have any high-energy vowel sounds. The only synonym I could think of was dream—and while the long e sound contributes high energy, dream doesn’t have the same connotations as nightmare. To use dream, I needed a strong verb that would make clear what kind of dreams these are. I came up with plagued (long a!).

Then I toyed with the rest of the sentence, trying to give it a few more high-energy sounds (there are a total of seven; eight if you pronounce the autumn as thee autumn). The revised version reads:

In the autumn of my eighteenth year, the dreams plagued me.

How’s that for a whole lot stronger? And all I did was tinker with the vowel sounds! Woot!

FORKS AND SPOONS

Sara looked up from her book to see her sister come to the door of their father’s study for the third time. Vicki’s hands were on her hips, and she was glowering at Sara. “Sara LeAnn! I’ve asked you twice already to set the table. I’m not going to ask you again.”

What a grump, Sara thought, rolling her eyes. She hated it when Vicki tried to act like Mama. She knew Vicki was annoyed. It was raining outside, and rain always made Vicki grouchy. Plus, today was Thursday, Vicki’s night to make dinner, and she hated cooking. She had been complaining for the past half hour because Mama was late from work. Now dinner was almost ready, so Vicki was whining that it would be cold by the time Mama got home.

Sara ignored her sister. She knew she should obey Vicki and set the table. But she just couldn’t right now: this Nancy Drew book was too exciting. Both times Vicki had come in to ask her to set the table, Sara had promised to come as soon as she finished her chapter. And she had intended to, but each chapter had ended so suspensefully that she had to start reading the next one to make sure Nancy didn’t get hit by a car or killed by the villain.

Sara now gave her sister the most pathetic look she could. “Just a few more pages, Vicki, please. I just have to find out if Nancy and Bess and George are going to be okay. They’ve been kidnapped!”

Vicki marched over to their father, who was sitting at his desk in the back of the room. “Daddy, tell Sara to set the table.” She glared back at Sara. “Now.”

Their father looked up from the sermon he was preparing. “Sara,” his voice held a mild remonstrance, “do what your sister says.”

***

Did you feel bogged down? Bored? Annoyed? Were you confused about whose point of view the story was in–Sara’s or Vicki’s? Did you just not care enough to keep reading?

Well, all those responses are because it’s not great writing. Great writing sucks you in and doesn’t let you go. It keeps tension (and thus reader interest) high. It is clear, spare, and necessary.

Here’s my attempt to revise the story’s beginning so that you, the reader, want to keep reading.

FORKS AND SPOONS

“Sara!”

Sara looked up from her book. Vicki stood in the doorway of their father’s study, her hands on her hips. “I’ve asked you twice already to set the table! I’m not going to ask you again.”

Sara rolled her eyes. She hated it when Vicki tried to act like Mama.

“Get up and go set the table!”

Sara gave her sister the most pathetic look she could. “Just a few more seconds, Vicki, please. I have to find out if Nancy and Bess and George are going to be okay. They’ve been kidnapped!”

“That’s what you said last time!” Vicki marched over to their father who sat at his desk in the back of the room. “Dad, tell Sara to set the table.” She glared back at Sara. “Now.”

Daddy took his earbuds out and looked up from the sermon he was preparing. “Sara, please go set the table.”

***

The revision is half the length of the original, and it moves faster because it’s not weighed down with back story or exposition. Still, I’d be curious to know what you think. Does the revision hold your interest more than the original? Do you want to keep reading? What (short of a car chase) would make it more compelling?

But as I worked, I was held in the hand of God, my work inspired by the Spirit of God breathing life into the words that sometimes poured generously across the page and sometimes had to be wrenched and wrestled there.

Let me be specific. My book is an introduction to the church year. Each chapter corresponds to one of the eight major seasons or days of the Christian calendar. The two chapters I was most dreading were Epiphany and Pentecost because these are not seasons but rather single days, and I wondered how I would ever find enough to say about them to fill a chapter.

The Epiphany chapter, particularly, gave me fits. I wrote and found nothing usable, so I wrote again with the same result. It took me 12 of my 16 hours to even find a gem I could use to provide direction for the chapter. But once I did, the writing flowed, and in just a few days I was able to finish the whole chapter, piecing in material I’d written—and written off—in those frustrating days of what seemed like wasted writing time.

Months later, when I got my editor’s comments back, guess which chapter he wanted me to significantly revise? Yep, Epiphany. He particularly wanted me to change the opening story and suggested moving one of two anecdotes from within the chapter to its beginning. Again this chapter gave me fits. I went through eight drafts, using various iterations of my editor’s suggestions before one line—one line!—from the chapter morphed into a story, and that story fit the themes of the chapter far better than I could have ever dreamed.

As I look back, I see dozens of instances like this one, where I felt like I was getting nowhere, banging my head against a wall of words, none of which were yielding to let me through to the road I knew was on the other side. But all that head-banging was not wasted, however painful it was at the time.

I think often of Jesus’ words to his disciples after they feed the 5000: “Gather up the fragments, that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12). Indeed, nothing was. Nothing is. Amazing, that.

I wrote a book last year. Really. A whole book. In about an hour a day. I’m still not sure how I did it. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I know that God had a lot to do with it. From getting the contract to creating a writing plan to actually writing and revising, God’s grace was present throughout this process.

After my initial dance of euphoria upon getting my book contract, reality set in, and with it, fear: how on earth was I going to write a book? When the contract came in the mail I had a three-year-old son and a three-month-old daughter—and eight hours of childcare each week.

Add to this the fact that I’m a lousy writer. Now, I’m a really good re-writer, but this means my writing process is highly time-consuming. I have to write a whole bunch of nothing, spewing all my random thoughts onto the page before I realize what I’m trying to say, or what is trying to be said through me (I’m never entirely sure which it is; it’s probably both).

Given the time-eating nature of writing garbage and then sifting through the garbage to find the one gem of a paragraph or sentence or even phrase that’s present in it, I wondered how I was ever going to finish a 35,000-word book in nine months.

Lynne Baab, author of eight books and my patron saint of writing, helped me map out a plan for finishing my book that took into account the fact that I spend about a quarter of my writing time actually writing, and the rest of it rewriting and revising.

It was a very aggressive schedule: two weeks (about 16 hours) to initially write/rewrite each of the eight chapters of my book, then one week (eight hours) to further revise each chapter. Then I sent my still very rough book out to five readers for feedback, after which I had another month (40 hours) to incorporate their comments into another round of revisions.

Amazingly, I was able to keep to this schedule, even managed to stay a little ahead of it.

Each day, I faithfully showed up at my computer, prayed that God would make it possible for me to do more than I knew I could do, and started typing. Some days, it felt obvious that God was working, and I wrote or revised way more than I expected to be able to.

Other days, it felt like I was pulling teeth to even get words on the page, like there was no gem to be found in the pile of garbage I’d written—and I’m usually really good at finding the gem in a pile of brain barf on the page, able to rework the entire piece around that one sentence or phrase. (Oddly, the gem as often as not doesn’t make it into the final draft, but it was necessary to move me in the direction the work wanted to move.)

But even on those days when I felt like my muse, the Holy Spirit, was silent, I see now, in retrospect, that He was still breathing inspiration into me. His words just needed time to gestate, germinate before they were ready to be birthed, to blossom. Invariably, though, those words eventually did blossom, and they were always better and more beautiful than I am capable of.

to be continued…