Word Arrangements

O! For a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.   — William Shakespeare

Is it muse? Or skill? I’ll take either, please.

Last week I wrote another flash memoir but have had to set it aside. I’ve edited and crunched it down to its core and while it says what I intended, it reads high, dry and flat as a Central Asian steppe. No, I take that back. A Central Asian steppe is a wondrous thing of beauty and mystery. My flash memoir is not. Sigh.

There is more to communication than tightly edited words—no matter how clever. Emotional tone is key and, for that piece at least, the key has gone missing.

In writing it I discovered the core idea, so I now know what tone I want. But I’m too close to it to inject the correct tone after the fact.

What to do? I’ll walk away for a while. It might be better to start from scratch having the idea and mood in mind from the beginning, then see what happens to the words.

Such a mysterious process–these little marks in front of our eyes transmit meaning beyond facts. They can affect our emotions, sometimes just by their arrangement.

How do we learn this? How does the objective ordering of words result in such variation of impression?

Any ideas?