7. Words

Fiction is made up of words...and all words have connotations. Connotations are the resonances (or side messages) that a word has beyond its literal meaning. For example, all of the following have the same literal meaning (or denotation), but different connotations:

        Female parent     Ma
        Mother            Mammy
        Mom               Mater
        Momma

"Female parent" is cold and clinical. The others have varying degrees of connotational baggage. "Mammy," for example, has a strong whiff of the south; "Mater" is the sort of word Monty Python would use when making fun of upper-class twits.

You can never completely control the connotations associated with words—the word "Mother" stirs up different emotions in different readers—but you can try to be aware of the most likely associations and use them to your advantage. When a son addresses his mother as "Mom," it has a different emotional flavor than addressing her as "Mother" or "Ma". You have to be aware of those emotional flavors, or you won't be in control of the side messages your writing is sending out.

I want to stress that all words have connotations. I started with "mother" because it's obviously a loaded word, but every word has side messages, however subtle they might be. Here's another set of examples:

"I'm a murderer."

"I'm the murderer."

"I'm your murderer."

These sentences only differ by a single word, and those differing words are so small and common you might think they're insignificant. However, you should feel how the sentences evoke different emotions:

"I'm a murderer" sounds like an anguished cry—the sort of thing characters might say when they've just discovered their actions accidentally killed someone.
"I'm the murderer" is a confession, as in a mystery story.
"I'm your murderer" summons up the image of a killer about to pull the trigger on the listener.

Of course, these sentences could have different meanings depending on their context in a story...but even on their own, they show that changing one small word can substantially change the inherent side messages of what you're writing.

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