On Writing Around a Word

In a workshop I ran in Toronto in 2015, I told eight writers, all of them displaced from somewhere, that no poem submitted that semester could use the word loss. Every poem in the first batch had used it, most of them twice, and not one had earned it. By the fourth week the room resented me. By the twelfth, three of them said the ban had taught them more about grief than anything else in the course.

The usual advice for a weak word is to replace it with a stronger one, which assumes the problem is the word's wattage. It is not. A word like loss is a compressed claim, a small invoice that arrives pre-approved, and a reader pays it without asking what it covers. The writer gets the emotional credit of naming the thing without doing the work of specifying it. This is not laziness in the moral sense. It is laziness in the engineering sense: the sentence found a fastener that already fit, so it stopped looking for the actual joint.

The excision drill

Here is the operational version, the one I now run on my own drafts before a single line is finished. Choose one ordinary word central to the subject, before you begin, and forbid it completely for the whole piece. Not a synonym swap. A full ban, including its close cousins. Then write, and mark every sentence that breaks under the ban. A sentence breaks in one of two ways. Either it needed a new fact, a specific noun or number that the banned word had been standing in for, or it needed nothing but a synonym, in which case the sentence was never carrying real weight and the banned word was doing exactly the amount of work a synonym would also do. The drill is not about finding fresher words. It sorts your sentences into the ones that had content and the ones that were leaning on a word to fake it.

One student, Yasamin, was writing about her apartment and had built the whole piece around the word home, using it nine times in a single page. I banned it. Her next draft had no home in it anywhere, and instead had a doorframe in Isfahan where her father had marked her height every August until she was fourteen, still standing six thousand kilometres from the apartment she was actually describing. The word home had been asking the reader to supply that doorframe on trust. Once it was gone, she had to supply it herself, and the piece gained a fact it had never actually possessed while the word was doing the paying.

The gap left is grammatical, not only emotional

What surprised me, running this drill for years now, is that the space a banned word leaves is rarely a feeling gap. It is a noun gap, or a verb gap, a hole in the sentence's actual information that the word had been quietly filling with a promise instead of a fact. Loss promises an object without naming one. Home promises a location without describing it. Freedom, which I have written about elsewhere and will not repeat here, promises a condition without specifying what was withheld. The drill works on any of these because it does not ask you to feel more. It asks the sentence to name what it is actually pointing at, and most drafts, mine included, discover they had been pointing at nothing in particular.

The obvious objection

You could say this is a parlour trick, that arbitrary rules imposed before drafting produce arbitrary discoveries, and that real precision comes from reading widely and revising honestly, not from banning a single word like a superstition. I partly agree, and the objection sharpens on a second point worth taking seriously: a writer who runs this drill on every single piece will develop a visible avoidance tic of their own, a prose that never says the plain word for anything, which is its own kind of dishonesty, opposite in direction but identical in effect to the vagueness it was meant to cure. I have read manuscripts like that, so careful to never name the thing that they read as evasive rather than precise. The drill is not a permanent style. It is a diagnostic you run once per project, on the one word doing the most unexamined lifting, and then you put the tool down and let the plain word back in wherever it has actually earned its place.

Yasamin kept the doorframe and, in her final draft, let the word home back in exactly once, in the last line, after she had already shown the reader everything the word had previously been hiding. It landed as an arrival rather than a shortcut. She told me afterward that the ban had not taught her to avoid the word. It had taught her what the word was for, and that turned out to be a much smaller and more useful thing to know.