verbal calisthenics

lately as I’ve been writing these daily “drafts” I’ve noticed myself getting drawn deeper into a habit which has always hovered over my writing practice for as long as i can remember, even as a little kid. I wonder if anyone else can relate to it.

it typically goes like this: i’m typing words as quickly as they occur to me, and then upon reviewing the sentences i feel mildly dissatisfied with the suitableness of a word or two. and so i look them up in an online dictionary, first to confirm that the words really mean what i think they mean, and then i wind up checking the thesaurus for more specific words if the dictionary entries feel lacking.

it starts innocuously with one or two words, and then sometimes, before I know it, I’m looking every second or third word up in the dictionary-followed-by-thesaurus, stumbling deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of alternate meaning. that’s not to say that i always trust the dictionary or thesaurus more than my instinct, nor that I’m necessarily seeking to “optimize” my word choice - sometimes i skim the list out of curiosity, just to see all the forking semantic paths which originated from my first thought. i also pay special attention to the sounds or phrasing of words as I string them together: do the number of syllables or consonants sound balanced in this sentence, do the words roll off the tongue the way i’d like them to? if i don’t find any thesaurus alternatives which sound as phonetically nice as, or better than, the original word I’d picked, I’ll usually scrap the exercise and stick to my first instinct.

more recently, a german word will occasionally spring to mind which, although arising in the midst of an english sentence, seems to flow with the essence of what I want to say. so i type it as it comes and then translate it back to english through DeepL before looking that english word up in the thesaurus.

all of this of course stretches out the writing process and makes it feel very engineered and tedious at times. if i’m particularly drained on a given day i will sometimes lose sight of what i was trying to say in the first place, much like someone exploring a street map for hours and then suddenly forgetting which way is north. but i can’t imagine the writing process without it. these steps are so familiar and deeply woven into the acts of thinking and typing that it happens almost reflexively; the process may sound contrived but in practice it feels like alchemy. i even challenged myself to write this post without using the dictionary/thesaurus even once - but i failed! (maybe i’ll try again later, as an experiment, just to see.)