Take any word . . .

Wordle 1,091 3/6

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I am writing this on Friday evening, with posting due tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking about a subject all day. Being completely stuck for ideas, I hunted for something in the news, on Instagram, by spending a few hours editing my WIP,  doing a Sudoku or two, washing up, stroking the dog, taking the cat to the vet, phoning a friend, eating a couple of meals and finally making a pact with myself that I would do a Wordle and whatever the word was (assuming I solved the puzzle) I would write about that. A Wordle is a guessing game where one inserts letters in the first line and is shown in yellow if the letter is right, but the placement wrong, and in green if the letter is completely right. Then those letters help one to work out the next line. Somehow I solved it in three goes, as above.

Of course, I am a bit short of time to write it now and I have realised that actually using the word may break the unspoken rule that one must never ever reveal the discovered word on the same day. I know this is published tomorrow, but any other blogger from More than Writers can access this draft!

So a task connected to the blog for 15th June is to guess the Wordle word without actually doing Wordle. It’s an incredibly useful task for a writer, who generally needs about fifty ways of saying something to avoid repetition. Take ‘he said’, for example. ‘Said’ could be retorted, reported, snorted, exclaimed, proclaimed, muttered, uttered, stuttered, sneered, cheered, leered, whispered, shouted, choked, joked, croaked, etc. Well that’s not fifty, but you see my point.

These won’t all be in a thesaurus as a synonym but in most cases they add to the meaning. However a thesaurus is brilliant for identifying a particular word. I’ve looked up my Wordle word and found quite a few with the same meaning. Here are some random synonyms to help you think of the word:

Crypt

Basement

Arch

Bounce

Safe

Box

Hurdle

Bound

And, just for fun, here is a crossword clue: A leap to find a cave (5) 

I love using a thesaurus, but I have to be careful. One word leads to another and before I know it I can spend an hour looking up words linked to words and end up writing such overly flowery language that it loses its previous rhythm, pace or voice. That’s why I like writing in the first person, restricting myself to mainly using my character’s vocabulary. Mind you, my present protagonist is an English student, as well as a dancer. Maybe I can take her dancing along on a word journey through a thesaurus?

I could, but I have a sneaky feeling that would be my kind of fun, not hers.

Happy writing! 

Annie Try writes Christian novels published by Instant Apostle and latterly by Kevin Mayhew. She is now editing the sequel to The Dangerous Dance of Emma JJ which has the working title, The Perilous Path of Emma JJ. She is just about to look up ‘perilous’ in a thesaurus, to see if she can find a better description.