April showers bring may flowers, and Mayflowers bring pilgrims.
As writers, we each have our own ways of expressing ourselves. In other words, though we all tell stories, we each have our own styles.
Still, there are some common tools in our tool kits. One is wordplay.
Wordplay is the thing that allows you to take the sentence, "I had a dog and his name was Blue," and morph it to, "I had a dog and he sang the blues," or "I had a frog and he croaked the blues," or...
Wordplay creates a phrase like "lucking fuvely" from an -ahem- less pristine saying.
It takes the stock (and therefore probably boring) idiom, "Create a dissent among the ranks," and spins it into the Sopranos bit of fun, "Create a little dysentery among the ranks."
AI enumerates several different types of wordplay, puns, double entendres, Spoonerisms, malapropisms, alliterations and portmanteaus (my social media creation, TwitFace, falls into this camp). But in the end, it's all about playing with language in order to tickle the reader.
I write action/humor romance, so it's a tool I find easier to fit in with my style. What about you? How can you use wordplay to enliven your prose and delight your reader?
Published since 2009, over the years I've accumulated various items of writing wisdom. The Third Tuesday Writing Tidbit showcases these items in no particular order. Click here to see all 3T Tidbits.
