Writing What You Can't Say

Issue 245

Prague, 2011

---

Listening closely to your speech will often provide clues for your writing. The most compelling, and potentially rewarding, moments of conversation come when you feel hesitation, uncertainty, strain, in those moments when your capacity for description seems to fail. It can be exasperating, these seconds of wordlessness, this childlike inability to locate the correct word. Often it happens right as a conversation reaches its climax: you halt while speaking a perfectly cogent sentence, unsure how to continue. You sense but can’t find the missing words. What you want to describe is too elusive, hard to explain—you had to be there, right?

If you do manage to catch yourself in these moments, you’ll realize that you’re at the edge of your knowledge, that you’ve just spoken past a border in your mind and crossed into territory that’s unmapped. Unfortunately, most people hurdle past these stutters—rushing for a word, grabbing what comes first—but there’s value in lingering, in noticing exactly where your sentence stumbles. Writing is an ambiguous and troublesome craft without much certainty, but this is one of the rare times when you’ll be shown the limits of your linguistic abilities.

Finding the right word for the indescribable—which is, incidentally, the most ghastly word in the language—is probably a good job description for a writer. The search, and strain, is the point. A moment of inarticulateness, when you pause and backtrack and mumble, unable to say what you want, is ripe for your writing. Of course it might feel maddening, that reach for the precise word, trying to encircle the concept that you can’t quite grasp. But if linguistic dexterity and flowery prose and engaging stories were effortless, then what’s all the fuss? There would be no need to scribble words onto a page.