Wrong and Better: What a Child Knows About Words

A small child remakes language every day, because nobody has told her yet which words are assigned to which things. She names sideways: by shape, by what a thing does, by what it once did to her. The tidal pool spent the spring as "the big bath" and is now, after some direct experience of it, "the cold." Both are truer than "the pool." This is the raw material of every fresh line you have ever loved. We call it talent when a grown songwriter does it. In a child we call it a mistake, and we fix it.

The correction reflex

Here is what happens in the second after someone says a wrong-and-better thing. You smile. Then you translate it into the proper word, and the proper word files the moment away, and the plate goes back to being the moon. Writers do this to themselves constantly. The first word that arrives is odd, so we swap it for the accurate one before it has even reached the page, and the accurate one is the one everybody already has. I think the whole discipline comes down to a half-second: write the odd word down before the translation arrives. The back pages of my current notebook are full of Wren's namings, collected like pressed flowers, and some of them are better lines than anything I did on purpose that week.

The wrong word is often the right one wearing the wrong coat.

Borrowing it back

You do not need a three-year-old in the house. You need her method. Name the thing by what it is doing, not by what it is called. Stand at the window and describe the gulls without the word gull, the rain without rain. It feels silly for about ninety seconds. Then something arrives that surprises you, and the surprise is the whole point: it is the feeling of the assigned word losing its grip on the thing. When I want to be shaken loose faster, I let SenseSpark hand me one sense at a time, because a smell or a texture has no official name to hide behind. And ten minutes of Morning Pages, before the editor in you is awake, will catch namings you did not know you had.

It is also how I started, though I did not know it at fourteen. Ms Iyer handed our class a battered anthology and told us to copy out any lines we liked. No ceremony, no test. I copied lines, and then began writing my own underneath them to see if I could tell the difference. Half of learning to write is exactly that: putting your sideways naming next to someone else's and looking honestly at the gap. Wren does the first part all day, for free. The notebook does the rest.

Sit with the wrong word

So when a wrong word turns up in a draft, don't evict it straight away. Ask what it knows. A word you reached for "by mistake" usually came from somewhere: a rhyme of memory, a sideways sense, a thing your body noticed before your vocabulary did. Or it is a plain miss. You get to decide, but decide slowly. The plate was wrong about the moon and right about the loneliness of it.

This week I developed the roll from the day Joe launched his little boat. The frame I keep is not the boat. It is Wren from behind, swallowed by a lifejacket two sizes too big, out of focus, the hull a pale shape beyond her. Not the photograph I meant to take, which is usually the sign. The lines worth keeping arrive the same way. Wrong, and better.