The Weight of One Word

I’ve been revising two novels lately—The Reel Life of Zara Kegg (due out next year from Regal House), and AmericaLand (currently looking for a home)—and I’ve been reminded how granular this work really is. How one word, just one, can tilt a sentence or change the page. Not only in meaning, but in rhythm, tone, emotional pitch. You move a word, or take it out, or drop in a better one, and suddenly the whole page breathes differently. Like music, change the rhythm or the key, you change the whole mood of the song.

Or it’s like calibrating a scanning electron microscope. You adjust a dial by the smallest degree, and the whole image sharpens—or collapses into blur. That’s what it feels like in revision: searching for that fine, almost imperceptible click where the language aligns with what the moment is actually trying to hold. There are no rules for this, just your own gut.

I didn’t understand this deep level of granularity in my early work. Maybe no writer does. And that might be part of what makes those first books hard to reread—not the stories, but the sentences that haven’t quite settled. The ones that almost work. Maybe I’ve just grown more patient with the process. I wish I had written then the way I write now—but of course I couldn’t. I wrote the best I could. That was  always the deal and forever will be.

We don’t talk about this much. Not the granular part. We talk about characters, scenes, plot, arcs. Even when we talk about sentences, it’s usually about avoiding clichés, or writing “beautifully,” or showing instead of telling. But this is different. It’s not flourish—it’s fidelity. It’s the feel of the thing. The sound of a thought arriving exactly when and how it should. Intangible, invisible, yet you can hold it in your hands.

And this isn’t about making the work precious or tight-assed or workshoppy. Really the opposite. The goal is for the book to feel effortless. For the voice to feel natural, inevitable. And that illusion—because it is an illusion—only happens through the kind of tedious, invisible tuning that most readers will never notice. Unless you don’t do it.

Because once you start seeing the words that are just a little off, you realize how many there are. A few on every page. Dozens in a chapter. Hundreds in a book. And they accumulate. They wear on the tone. They sand the edge off emotion. They dull the thing you’re trying to make shine.

Poetry won’t let you get away with that. A bad word in a poem stands out. But fiction, especially long fiction, lets you slide. That’s the danger. The sentence “works.” It just doesn’t do what it could have done. It rings, but not as clearly as it might have.

So this is the other part of writing. The quiet, obsessive-compulsive part. Not rewriting the scene. Just nudging the sentence. Nudging it again. Listening for the slight off note. Shifting a word one position. Cutting one that’s trying too hard. Waiting for the rhythm to lock in.

It’s slow. It’s mostly thankless. But it’s how the book becomes the book.