The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Words

Words sneak into your awareness and hunker down like squatters in abandoned houses. They are as devious as visiting relatives, persistent as commission sales reps in big box stores, urging you to try things you have no intention of ever owning, assuring you how useful they are, hinting that if you order now, you'll also get steak knives thrown in for free.

Words flutter about like a mob of hungry pigeons, alert for targets of opportunity. They pout, strut, dart, the brave among them taking risks that amuse and annoy us. Some words, well known for their interior music, are as buskers or street-corner performers, suggesting the activity inherent in their name. You have only to see a word such as buzz or its cousin, buzzing before a picture of a bee or a band saw or some form of attention-getting mechanism arrives. When buzz is used as an adjective, as in buzz words, even then it is fecund with exoskeleton thanks to its meaning of special vocabulary for a particularized discipline. As a verb, buzz works well, signifying some device set in action to signal an arrival or a call for attention. I'll buzz you in. The buzzer clamored for his attention.

When you see or hear the word susurrous, you are transported with immediacy to the whisper of a stream over a bed of rocks or the secretive conversation among a throng of doves; not to mention the fun of conflating the word with the imaginative name for a Japanese-made auto. The word used to describe this sound of meaning quality, onomatopoeia, conveys an Oriental sense of mystery, revealed only by the chanting of a mantra to unlock the linguistic door.

However sensual the sound of susurrous, another word from the S family, squeamish, embeds the sensors that trigger a feeling verging upon another S-word yet, stomach, in a turmoil of discomfort.

Tuna, by itself, is not particularly humorous, nor is sandwich, but the mere thought of conjoining the two to produce tuna sandwich sends a grin of near mystical mischief to appear, a love note from your secret place of meaning. Try repeating the phrase tuna sandwich a few times without cracking a smile.

Words can do that to you, transport you, change your mood, inspire you, even frighten you. Edgar Allen Poe spent some considerable time deliberating over word choice, intent on conveying a mounting atmosphere of terror, aware of the effectiveness each word bore as he erected the pyramids and sphinxes of the bizarre and enigmatic. He may not have succeeded in frightening you as, say, his later-day acolyte, Steven King, has done, but Poe has left you a legacy, the receipt of which is to make you suspicious, wary, uneasy.

Spectacular is a word you use from time to time as a way to describe certain friends, male or female; it has become a useful term because of the way the merest phrasing of the word in your mind suggests the bodacious, good-cheer presence of the individual.

Your earlier mention of the word mantra, the mystical pattern of words used in mysticism-based meditation. Mantras often contain the word from Hindu prayer, Om, or Aum, which itself is an exhortation and invocation; they also contain Sanskrit designer words called Bija words, usually a conflation of the qualities of a particular god or goddess. These Bija words are quintessential buzzwords, intended as meditational tools to help the spiritual aspirant observe then experience the very qualities inherent in the words.

There are also cooking- and food-related words such as succulent or esculent, or perhaps even savory, their very mention likely to provoke images of curries and gumbos, of posole and menudo, causing you to slather as you consider.

Words have the power to turn you inside out, to arouse, mollify, enrage, enchant, engage you. The musician is guardian of her instrument, the chef protector of his knives, the hunter of his weaponry. The writer's tool is the kit of words, the possessive vocabulary he or she might own, with newer, more modern tools as much on the wish list as the iPhone on the modern person's wish list

Hanging in the Balance

A mantra is a series of words or syllables which combine the names or aspects of the godhead and are intended as an adjunct to meditation. The word has its roots in Sanskrit, which is itself intended as a language by which to convey the meaning and intensity of mystical scripts, formulas, chants, and poems. To make matters even more intriguing, the words used in Sanskrit-based mantras are encapsulations of the personalities of gods and goddesses are additionally special, meaning that even a person who has some Sanskrit is not likely to use these so-called bija or jewel words except when chanting or meditating on mantras that contain them.

This is probably more than you wanted to know about mantras and Sanskrit and bija words, just as Melville probably, now that you think about it, told you more about whales than you want to know. But the fact is that there are mantras for the writing and telling of story; they are not in Sanskrit nor do they have bija words in them. One of the more powerful mantras for story telling is: Never take the reader where the reader wants to go. Meditating on this mantra has caused many aspiring writers to understand how important it is not to tell the reader too much about whales until the reader is sufficiently invested in the story that he has to suffer the stuff on whales to find out what happens to the characters. When the reader is sufficiently caught up in the story, the writer can successfully thrown in a chapter or two about whales and although the reader may ultimately complain, the reader will, as some recent characters in American political activities have put it, stay the course.

Another mantra of significant value to the writer is the single word withhold, a word and concept not to be taken lightly. The reader reads to be made interested in characters who take on a bigger-than-life resonance, continuing to read to see what happens to the characters. At more or less the moment the reader finds out, the story is over. In answer then to the question, when does a story end, the answer becomes When the reader finds out what happens. In exaggerated theory, the ideal place for the discovery or revelation or even the backstory-as-explanation is the penultimate chapter of a novel because, cumbersome as such an arrangement might be, the reader would put up with it to find out what happens. Come to think of it, the reader would even put up with all that stuff about whales to find out what happened to Ishmael.

The product created by withholding is suspense.

Suspense is the glue that holds stories together.

Mantras may lead to insight, even mystical union. Suspense leads to dramatic discovery.