October 2026 …
A few years ago I saw the film To Olivia, a story about Roald Dahl and his wife, Patricia Neal, processing their grief at the passing of their daughter, Olivia. For me, one of the most iconic scenes of the movie is when Dahl walks Olivia to the village shop to buy sweets. As they walk they play word games, inventing names for sweets and features that were unique to the sweets. Many of their fantastical inventions became part of Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
What I found striking was that it portrayed how we develop and enrich our unique writing and storytelling styles by allowing ourselves the chance to play with words. Words and phrases that may seem silly at that moment create the simple habit of testing what combinations generate particular images and feelings. Allowing ourselves the space to play builds the habit for employing unique word choices and phrases.
I am very fortunate that my wife, Monique, not only has a very wide vocabulary but also shares a great sense of fun around word play. Our conversations are rarely dull, and we take delight in sharing examples of how poorly chosen words can create unintended meanings. Some examples include the overuse of ‘literally’ when the context is clearly non-literal; sentences where the subject and object are poorly sequenced; and the overuse of ‘lazy’ adverbs.
My favourite examples are those involving poor punctuation – inevitably leading to ‘Dad Joke’ style responses. The ‘Huge Rug Sale’ phrase leads to the observation of “who would want to buy a huge rug?”. There is also play based on mishearing or (deliberately) misunderstanding words: ‘you’ becomes ‘Hugh’ or ‘ewe’. We are even compiling our own ‘Lexicon of Under-Utilised Words’; i.e. words that we regard as fun and colourful, but which are rarely used. Some may be considered old words but their use allows stories to stand out a little more clearly.
Even punctuation can form part of the process. A simple phrase like ‘Don’t, stop!’ (meaning ‘stop what you are doing’) changes to ‘Don’t stop’ (as in ‘keep going’), merely by removing a comma. It can be difficult to portray inflection and feeling into written dialogue, but this is easily achieved with the careful choice of words and punctuation.
I regularly participate in flash fiction competitions, with stories limited to 500 words, as well as micro-fiction competitions, where stories are limited to 250 or even 100 words. In the case of micro-fiction, there is no room for redundant words or phrases so the habit of word play comes into its own. The ability to hone phrases to their bare minimum while still conveying feeling, relies on the ability to remove redundancies and rearrange words while still retaining the meaning.
Recently, a friend introduced me to Haiku, a Japanese poetic form based on seventeen syllables or pulses, a phrase fragment and a longer phrase. There are other rules but Haiku can be regarded as a form of micro-poetry; the lyrical conveying of a feeling and image with minimal words. It doesn’t matter if experts would accept the poems as proper Haiku, the mere exercise of their creation stimulates the discovery of the importance of word order and phrasing. The image created in the reader’s mind is just as important as the words on the page.
In 1657, the French polymath, Blaisé Pascal wrote in Lettres Provinciales, ‘I’m sorry to have written such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.’ It’s easy to be verbose, but much harder to present ideas succinctly. Word play fosters the instinct to write succinct pieces, providing just enough words to allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest. Herein lies the joy.