Over the last few installments, I’ve discussed and sampled some of my upcoming book, QUILTBAG, a series of plutogram short stories—each of them written to emphasize one letter in the eight-letter acronym. This is experimental writing, and I couldn’t say whether this kind of work has a future beyond this one work.
But experiments yield data, and for the sake of anyone else who wants to try something similar, I thought I’d jot down some observations here.
The more uncommon the letter, the more noticeable its presence. According to most sources, the least common letters are the four highest scorers in Scrabble—Q, Z, J, and X. These letters are uncommon enough to be noticeable if they show up anywhere in a word. In the phrase “exquisite tequila daquiris,” for instance, the q’s don’t start any of the three words, but they still ping the reader’s awareness.
For all other letters, I only saw a noticeable difference when emphasizing words that started with the given letter.
There’s no harm in making your life a little easier. Major characters’ names should begin with different letters—that just makes them more memorable. But your main character’s name can begin with the key letter, as long as that feels natural.
Likewise, the letter you’re using can inspire or influence your plot to some degree. When I was doing the Q section of QUILTBAG, I looked at the most common q-words and realized one had gotten a lot more common in the last decade—quarantine. I found I couldn’t resist exploring the ways that COVID-19 quarantine pods could challenge personal relationships—or foster them. A similar process led me to Uma the undertaker in the U section.
Working with a single letter is easier than working with a set of letters or a sound. I think emphasizing a set of letters would be difficult unless you really telegraphed what you were doing early on. The effect of a repeated sound is well documented in poetry, but that’d be more work (see next point).
Searching in OneLook kept giving me some extra q-containing words and u-words for those sections’ revisions. If I were to try to build a story around a repeated sound, I’d look up instances of that sound using data from a pronouncing dictionary and a little Excel spreadsheet-fu. (Others might prefer to write a Python program.)
All writing is artificial: nobody captures every um, er, ah, and uh that makes its way into everyday speech. But something like a plutogram is a little extra artificial, and you have to decide how far you want to take that. There were times when I turned down obvious opportunities to put in another Q or U, because the results of doing so would have been out of character or otherwise too forced.
Especially with Q, I had to watch my story’s length and vary its vocabulary. While there are lots of “nervous” q-words that are appropriate to quarantine—quiver, quash, quake, quaver, queasy—I couldn’t lean on those few or they’d get stale from overuse. I likewise kept the word ugly out of the U story until the climax—the part where the feelings did indeed get ugly.
One natural way to vary your vocabulary is to vary your subject matter. This is good advice for relationship-themed stories in general. Touching on the arts and sciences, foreign languages, food and drink, work, and all those other things you might talk about on a date—that was a clear case where enriching the vocabulary also enriched the characters. Fingers crossed about the results!
Tomorrow: A meme about degradation! But not the risqué kind.