Beautiful: A Story for Chris
By Naomi
Finding a gift for Chris was something I never thought I would be tasked with, but achallenge I was willing to embrace with excitement. After a lot of thought, I was reminded of a
story that Chris wrote semester. The story followed the life cycle of tadpoles in an extremely
visual and visceral way. What was unique about this story though, was Chris’s ability to
implement complex language into his writing. There were so many words in his story that were
far past my personal levels of comprehension, but it was clear that he was using them to add to
the richness of the story.
This story made me think about how much of a difference the diction used in a story can
make. A person can say the same thing with different words, but two messages of varying
impacts will be conveyed. The sentence the sun is shining and the sentence the sun’s rays
are billowing down in ribbons of warm, relaxing light have the same meaning, but very
different impacts. It was understanding this that inspired me to write the story “Beautiful”, A story
about a boy who brightened the world with the use of color and vibrant words.
Since the story revolves around the power of language, I wanted the language of the
story to gradually become more and more complicated as the story itself progressed. This
created a challenge for me because my writing style revolves around my attempts to immerse
the reader in the world of my story, using as descriptive words as I can. But the point of this
story is that everything is simple and boring but not unpleasant. It’s that the world itself was
incapable of being described immersively by words due to the citizen’s misuse of language. As
a writer, I had to find a difficult balance between inviting the reader into the story and letting
them see it, and using too descriptive language that the impact of the progressively complex
language would lose it’s effect.
Another challenge I ran into was with Chris’s writing style. Since this is a gift for him, my goal at
first had been to mimic his style in a way of sort of honoring it, but this brought about even more
issues because Chris’ writing style is incredibly unique and hard to emulate. The other issue
was in mimicking Chris’ vocabulary. I spent hours upon hours looking at thesauruses and
dictionaries trying to expand my vocabulary enough to mimic his use of language. I quickly
realized that gaining the ability to do so in such a short amount of time was impossible. So, to
solve both of these problems, I chose to simplify the writing style and try to model it after a
children’s book. That way, any use of complex words would be impactful since the entirety of the
book was simplified. I wouldn’t have to use insanely large or rare words in order to show the
main character’s knowledge, and I wouldn’t have to attempt to immerse the reader too much
since the story would be meant more or less for children and their imaginations would be able to
run with even a small amount of information.
Taking all that into account, it took a good amount of time and effort to write this story.
But it’s one that I’m proud of, and one that I hope Chris will appreciate. Writing this was a
journey for me, but it was a fun one.