Bite-Sized Line Editing: Word Choice and World Building
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When it comes to world building, writers often think—and rightly so—about magic systems, politics, culture, religion, and more. These are important elements to think about when you’re crafting a totally new world.
But for a world that feels real and immersive for a reader, take a tip from a line editor and pay attention to your word choices too.
Welcome to the next installment of our bite-sized line editing series, which covers small writing craft elements that you can look for in your own writing when you’re tackling line edits.
Today’s topic? Word choice.
Why do individual words matter?
Word choice, or diction, is an important part of crafting a world that feels natural and lifelike, even if that world has three moons or everyone lives underwater. For many sci-fi and fantasy writers, the settings and unique systems, like magic, of your world are extremely vivid. You can see them clearly in your mind, but translating that to the page for your reader can be a challenge. While you’re working on depicting a scene or explaining how a character feels, pay attention to the words you’re using. Every word has its very own rhythm and feel, and you can play with that rhythm and feel to make readers experience your book in an intentional way.
How words can change the feel of a story
Imagine you’re writing a story about a character who is learning magic. What do you call people who can use magic in your story? Are they wizards? Witches? These words have their own associations—for instance, the phrase “boy wizard” may bring Harry Potter to mind for many, and “witches” might draw up an image of a classic broom-riding witch with a pointed black hat and companionable black cat. But just because there are some premade associations with these words doesn’t mean that you can’t make them your own!
You can also think about whether the terms of your world are gendered or not. In Susan Dennard’s Witchlands series, everyone who can use the magic, regardless of gender, is referred to as a witch. And there are far more words you can use, each with their own unique flavors, such as “mage,” “alchemist,” or “arcanist,” like Patrick Rothfuss does in his Kingkiller Chronicles. And don’t forget that you can also devise your own terms if there isn’t a word that quite captures the flavor you’re going for. Brandon Sanderson has a knack for this, with “rithmatist” in his YA fantasy The Rithmatist, and in the Mistborn series, “Allomancer” is the term used for those who can burn metals to temporarily gain certain abilities or enhancements.
Think about the unique terms of your world—do they add to the atmosphere you’re building? Do the terms fit with the feel and flavor of the scene you’re setting? You can also think about the common terms you use, such as words for a person’s job or identity—are there any that you could invent a new term for to give it a little more interest or draw a reader’s attention to it?
Making sure your words fit your world
When I’m working on speculative fiction as a line editor, I make myself extremely sensitive to language, testing how things sound, how words and phrases “feel,” as much as you can feel the written word. Some of this sensitivity is a natural instinct towards language and its many contexts, meanings, and nuances, but I’ve also learned how to pay more attention to words over the years from grappling with my own stories and working on scores of manuscripts.
You can learn how to do it too.
The primary method is taking your time to read carefully. This gives you the chance to hear the words and how they’re working together, not just looking at what information they convey. Slowing down also helps you see where you may have taken a shortcut to express an idea or fell back on something familiar or stereotypical even if it doesn’t fit the world or the character. These can creep in very subtly, but if they’re left unchecked, they can jar a reader out of the story because they simply don’t make sense with the rest of the world.
In a fantasy novel I was recently working on, the author had built an imaginative world with magic and various kingdoms. There were dozens of original terms and names (creatures aplenty!), but there were also some words that didn’t quite fit the world or the protagonist (who was also the narrator). For opportunities to make the story feel more cohesive and true to itself, here are a few words and terms I drew the author’s attention to:
Carbon dioxide. This is a technical term that implies quite a bit, including a knowledge of molecules and the existence of something like a microscope that would allow people in this world to study them. In this fantasy world that didn’t have much technology beyond what could be used to construct a castle, this stands out. In the sentence, I changed this to “breath” to convey the same idea without introducing a level of science this world probably doesn’t have.
Stratosphere. Like “carbon dioxide,” this word has a lot of implications wrapped up in it, such as meteorology and rocket science. Even if this fantasy world had developed a way to study the atmosphere in a more technical way, the question becomes whether it makes sense for the protagonist to know a technical term like this and think of it immediately when making a joke. In the case of this story, the answer was no, so I changed the wording.
Klicks. This term, commonly used in a US military context, refers to kilometers. I flagged this for the author for a few reasons, including that the narrator used both miles and kilometers to refer to distances in the manuscript. From a world-building standpoint, using consistent measurements is a small but important way to build a cohesive world.
Going on autopilot. “Autopilot” is a word that describes devices for automatically steering aircraft, ships, and spacecraft, so in a fantasy world offering only horses as a mode of transportation, it would most likely not exist. Where the protagonist said that she went on autopilot, I suggested a phrase like saying she was “in a daze.”
In another manuscript, I drew an author’s attention to a scene where a character insults a woman who lives alone on the edge of town and who doesn’t fit into their local community, calling her a “witch.” In the rest of the book, magic users were treated with reverence and respect, so I pointed out to the author that “witch” would likely not be an insult in this world.
These are small changes—just a few words—but they can make a big difference for the consistency of your fictional world and for your readers’ immersion! Keep an eye out for chances to infuse more character and flavor into your world building with the use of a well-chosen word or phrase.
Word choice as it relates to your world building is just one element to keep an eye out for while line editing. Stay tuned for our next installment on bite-sized line editing! Missed our previous post? Check out our mini crash course on participial phrases.
You can also read more about line editing on our blog.
Thanks to Pure Julia via Unsplash for the photo!
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