A single word or phrase can alter how a sentence reads. It always tickles me how a single edit can dramatically effect a piece of writing. The power of language and how we choose to wield it is what sets one writer apart from another. It's in our voices, our styles, and how we tell our tales.Mark Twain famously calls it the difference between lightning and a lightning bug, but it's more than that. The decision to use filter words versus not, to use description versus internalization, to embrace a character's voice or the author's voice--these choices all shape the writing in unique ways. It's also why ten writers can take the same premise and create ten different novels. Just look at how many re-tellings exist, from Romeo & Juliet, to fairy tales, to stories that all draw from the same thematic archetype.The words we choose matter. It makes a story ours.

Back when I was writing Blue Fire, I did a lot of tweaking, and I noticed the differences these edits made to some of the scenes. What it came down to most often, was taking words anyone could have written and revising them with more voice--either mine or my protagonist's.Let's take a closer look at one of those instances. This particular paragraph appears in the first few chapters of the book. My first attempt looked like:

We slipped out through the gates and onto the farm proper. Horses grazed in roped off corrals, with several wagons nearby. I saw a few carriages mixed in, proof that wealth didn't protect you from the Duke's soldiers.

This felt flat to me, because "saw" is a boring verb. It's accurate, but since I'm describing what was seen, we already know my protagonist, Nya, saw it. She's the point-of-view character after all. It doesn't add anything to the sentence and makes it feel told. It also uses a filter word, and I wanted a tighter point of view. The filter word pushed readers away.So I rewrote it without the telling filter word:

We slipped out through the gates and onto the farm proper. Horses grazed in roped off corrals, with several wagons nearby. There were a few carriages mixed in, proof that wealth didn't protect you from the Duke's soldiers.

Again, a perfectly legitimate sentence, but this feels the same way. Flat, authorial, telling you what was there instead of showing Nya seeing it. There's no real sense of her here, and this could be any narrator describing this. It doesn't share any additional information beyond what it already there on the page.In the final draft, I wrote it like this:

We slipped out through the gates and onto the farm proper. Horses grazed in roped off corrals, with several wagons nearby. I even spotted a few carriages mixed in, proof that wealth didn't protect you from the Duke's soldiers.

To me, these three simple words convey more than just what was there and shift this into Nya's voice and point of view. "Spotted" implies she was looking for things, searching for something, so she's actively engaged in what's going on and not just a casual observer. "Even spotted" suggests the carriages might have been hidden or were unexpected to find, which could imply there's more to those carriages than meets the eye. It uses judgment from Nya, so it reads as if she's proud that she was able to spot those possibly hidden carriages.It may not seem like much of a change, but multiply this by the thousands of paragraphs in a novel, and you eliminate thousands of told prose or flat writing. You take advantage of every opportunity to let the writing work harder for you, showing both what's there and why it matters. The writing becomes layered and richer than writing that just explains the story and moves on.It's the subtle things that make a difference between grabbing a reader and letting them skim. What words you use in your writing create the voice and style so it's not just a basic description anyone could have written. A minor word change can also change a paragraph from told and flat to shown and interesting.How much attention do you pay to the little words and subtle changes?