Opinionator | Draft: Weighing My Words

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

As a child, I had a relatively unusual speech impediment: I couldn't form the sounds sh, j or ch properly, and this made a large swath of words difficult to pronounce. The word just would come out sounding like chust or shust; double-whammy words like church never emerged cleanly even if I squared myself and took a good run at them; if I said that I was a Jew someone in earshot might call out "gesundheit!" (everybody's a comedian), and I dreaded having to speak my own name. An adult's uncomprehending "Can you say that again?" was a staple of my life.

Because I found this mortifying, I learned early to plan each word in advance. Given enough determination, almost any message could be recast in less perilous, albeit slightly formal vocabulary — vocabulary that might have seemed a bit peculiar coming from a child, but served me well. I never offered a suggestion or a choice, only an alternative; I never judged a playground contest, only decided or considered or even weighed it; I'd no sooner have used a word like challenge in front of my peers than I'd have ordered chimichangas. When called on in class, I hesitated on the verge, surveying options: a dozen alternate paths for every sentence, an infinitely proliferating map of every possible route to a given meaning. What might have sounded to others like a thoughtful pause was, in reality, the interval in which I hectically planned my route — turning the syntax of a sentence on its head if necessary in order to land nimbly without touching those three dreaded sounds.

If, as often happened, there was no getting around a verbally hazardous name or title, I learned to hesitate long enough — pretending to have momentarily forgotten a word — to induce other people to say it for me. Recently, while explaining to a friend the lengths I used to go to in order to avoid certain sounds, I raised the topic of that movie about the king of England who had to overcome his stutter … (here I trailed off; my friend helpfully offered the movie's title) …. and after making reference to that Australian actor who plays the tutor, I once more paused … (my friend gladly supplied the actor's name). Only then did I alert her to the fact that I'd choreographed my way out of having to say either "The King's Speech" or that sonic double-gainer, Geoffrey Rush.

(Incidentally, no unnecessary words were harmed in the making of the prior paragraph. Hence the use of topic instead of subject … king of England rather than English king … and I'd choreographed my way out of rather than she'd enabled me to avoid. You see how it works.)

Out loud, language was a minefield, hazards looming all around. But on the blank page! The blank page was a different element altogether — spacious, bright, astonishingly unimpeded. Every word at my disposal, crisp and clean and comprehensible. When I wrote, my self-consciousness vanished. I could, if so inclined, tell the world Joshua changed his judgment. I could order a lifetime's worth of fictional chimichangas, swear without anyone thinking I was saying chit. On the page I could speak my own name clearly.

Only later, years after the improvement of both my speech and my self-confidence allowed me to drop my verbal hyper-vigilance, did it occur to me to wonder about the literary watermark left by speech impediments. Sure enough, the literary map is dotted with fellow sufferers. Lewis Carroll and Somerset Maugham had stutters, as did Henry James, whose affliction was immortalized by Edith Wharton in "A Backward Glance." In his memoir "Self-Consciousness," John Updike discusses his own stutter ("a kind of windowpane suddenly inserted in front of my face while I was talking … an obdurate barrier thrust into my throat"); and Margaret Drabble's description of the verbal circumlocutions necessary to avoid words that trigger her stammer will leave any veteran of a speech impediment nodding in recognition.

While one can't know for sure, it seems to me that the flexibility necessary to overcome such verbal adversity must occasionally leave its signature on a writer's style. Drabble has speculated that Henry James's stammer might have helped shape his literary voice, and in a 2004 article in The Telegraph titled "The Literary Stammer," Robert Douglas-Fairhurst discusses James's "snaking sentences, full of measured subclauses and self-qualifications, which may or may not have emerged from the way that stammerers learn to avoid words likely to snag their voices, nimbly sidestepping danger with an alternative word, a new direction." A friend of mine has even suggested, though there's no way to be certain, that the famously playful portmanteau words of "Jabberwocky" might have their origin in Lewis Carroll's need to avoid troublesome sounds.

Certainly it's always seemed to me that, as literary boot camps go, navigating a mild speech impediment has its merits. Not only can the page be a refuge from the harassments of speech, but needing to avoid certain words brings home firmly that most fundamental of writerly lessons: there is always, always an alternate way to get your meaning across. There are, in fact, 50 or 500 ways to say any given thing.

And while treating a segment of one's vocabulary as verboten might not be a sustainable way to write a novel, it's not necessarily a bad form of writerly calisthenics. Not when one is operating in a field where one lives or dies by one's ability to throw a sentence in the air, rotate it in three dimensions — then make it dance on the head of a pin, do a quadruple flip, and stick the landing.

I was 17 when, on one intimidating and lovely day, my own verbal calisthenics ended decisively. I needed to deliver a speech in front of a large audience — and no matter how I tried to divert my vocabulary or my thoughts as I prepared for the event, what I really wanted to talk about was changes. I wrote and rewrote sentence after sentence, only to arrive, exasperated and bored with myself, at the conclusion that no synonym would do — and that enough was enough. Hang the self-consciousness, from then on I was simply going to use the best words — the deliciously, luxuriously right words — for what I needed to say.

But although my verbal hyper-vigilance ended that day at the podium — and although I now enjoy public speaking, and revert to my old speech pattern only when fatigue or a poor phone connection prompts me to make extra effort to pronounce each word distinctly — the gratitude I feel for the luminous, silent and utterly barrier-free world of writing has never vanished.

In high school, our swim coach would have us train wearing drag suits: loose second suits on top of the regular team suits we wore. The intent was to slow us swimmers down, make us have to work just a bit harder on every stroke. Come the day of the race, when we'd pop into the pool wearing only our team suits, the experience never failed to shock. The water felt colder, the submerged lights somehow brighter, the entire underwater world looser and astonishingly unimpeded. A person could fly in that water — and we did, we took off through the chill, clear element like dolphins. It was the same sensation I had as a child, and continue to have, when I turn to the blank page: perfect, sweet freedom.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels "From a Sealed Room" and "Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story." Her novella "I Was Here" is currently being released in serial form on the Rooster app for iPhone (www.readrooster.com).

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