Boy you love the way that thing that Mark Twain said, sounded.
But it was more fundamental to the actual expression that it made sense.
If it didn't make sense, it wouldn't matter that it sounded nice.
It would be gibberish.
It could be music, maybe, but it wouldn't really be language.
The way we think of the structure of this pyramid then,
is that the things that are on the bottom are more fundamental and
more independent of the things that are above them.
The fancy stuff is not up here, because its superfluous.
It's up here because it needs to have all of the things below it also working.
If the connotation,
if you use a word that is correct in his denotation, and that's all it is.
Fine.
You haven't messed anything up.
But if you've tried to use a word for the sake of its connotation, and
ignored its denotation and actually used a denotation that was incorrect,
then the whole thing fails, the pyramid collapses.
First it has to be meaningful and sensible and clear for
the purposes of us in story-writing mode.
We need to be talking about what these things look like,
what they sound like, what they smell like, what they taste like,
what they feel like, the senses evoked.
Then we can get into mood.
Then we can get into subtext.
Then we can pay attention to trying to get the music of the language,
the sound to sound good.
And only when all of these things work do you have this sense that
the miraculous extra thing has happened.
I also in my own version of this, I often with my students here at Wesleyan
will often want to think of putting a lightbulb up here, right.
And there's a wire that goes down to the power source.
And it's only when all of these things work, that the lightbulb blows up.
And in some sense, you might think of each word as having a structure like this.
So when it's really,
really working, as you'll see in a later segment when we talk about Muriel Spark,
when it's really, really working, one word can make a light Flow come
on that throws itself over all of the rest of the novel just with one word.
You know that power that one word can have to change the meaning of everything that
surrounded it.