One of the many joys I get from writing is in choosing words. To me, they all have shades, from the lightest ivory to the darkest black, and choosing just the right shade to portray the emotion that I’m going for is a hobby. Like a pastel painter, I play and blend until I have the exact meaning I want.

To explain how I do it, this is from a book I just turned in to my agent – It’s a woman, after her husband got an ALS diagnosis.

This was a key scene; the emotion had to be real and raw. So first, I closed my eyes and sat with it—imagined what I’d feel if I found out my husband had 3-6 months to live, and every moment of that time, he’d be suffering.

Obviously it’s distressing, but HOW? How would this change my life long term? Short term? Grief is there, of course, but what else? Fear, right? What does that feel like? I mean viscerally, inside my body? Inside my mind? There are a zillion ways to describe it, but I decided to use two things – being lost and not knowing what to do, and cold – the kind of cold inside that you can’t get away from.

Then I went to my go-to online tool, The One Look thesaurus (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/), and looked up ‘cold’. Here’s the list:

1. ice-cold 2. gelid 3. frigid 4. frosty 5. acold 6. frore 7. algid 8. parky 9. bleak 10. cool 11. icy 12. wintry 13. chilled 14. freezing 15. intense 16. crisp 17. nippy 18. frigorific 19. dead 20. stone-cold

21. inhuman 22. inhumane 23. shivery 24. shivering 25. frosted 26. Rimy 27. refrigerant 28. nipping 29. emotionless 30. passionless 31. far 32. cutting 33. snappy 34. perfect 35. insensate 36. rimed 37. unenthusiastic 38. old 39. iced 40. heatless

41. stale 42. unconscious 43. glacial 44. unloving 45. Arctic 46. raw 47. cold-blooded 48. polar 49. unwarmed 50. unheated 51. common cold 52. low temperature 53. refrigerated 54. chilly 55. warm 56. rainy 57. snowy 58. bloodedness 59. winter 60. damp

61. foggy 62. windy 63. dark 64. humid 65. swelteringly 66. cloudy 67. muggy 68. blowy 69. drizzly 70. ungenial 71. miserable 72. blistery 73. wintery 74. frostbitten 75. icey 76. slushy 77. unfeeling 78. sleety 79. stormy 80. subzero

 

A lot of them didn’t work, but I shortened the list to

Chilled

Icy

Arctic

Glacial

Slushy

Sleety

Those weren’t the exact right shade either, but it got my brain moving in the right direction. I sorted through words in my mind until I found the exact one I was looking for.

Then, I wanted to describe what scrambled, panicky thoughts felt like. You know, when you’re so freaked that you can’t even follow one thought to the end until another takes it’s place. You end up nowhere but exhausted at the end.

This is what I eventually ended up with:

I won’t burden Roger with my anger, and the massive, below-the-surface iceberg of pain. And fear.

The fear is a live thing inside my chest, chewing and tearing, trying to get out. To keep my hands busy, I mindlessly clean while my mind runs mazes of scenarios, each ending in dark, blind alleys that turn my blood to an icy slurry. I back away, only to scurry down another.

Ah. So satisfying.