My Wordle Way

Like many other people, I've made a habit of starting my day by playing Wordle, the game where you have six chances to guess a five-letter word. Here's a link to the game, along with a list of the rules. Briefly, you type your guess (which must be a real word) into the website. Each box represents a letter. Green boxes indicate the right letter in the right spot; yellow boxes represent letters in the word but in the wrong place; and gray boxes are letters that don't belong. This is my strategy:

1. Start with a word that will give you common vowels and consonants. I use STARE. 

2. Based on how you did with the first guess, choose a word that keeps all green letters the same and moves yellow letters to different positions. (I should note that I play on Hard mode, which requires you to reuse green and yellow letters. Some people like to start fresh with a different set of letters, but I prefer to focus on getting the right letters in the right places.) If you didn't have any luck with vowels, try a word with a different combination. I sometimes use PRION as my second word.

3. Once you have two or three letters, it then becomes a matter of moving them into the right spots and figuring out what the missing letters could be. Sometimes if I get stuck at this point, I take a break from the game and return to it later. Other times, I may try a "brute force" method, where I mentally test unused letters in unfilled spots to see if I make a word. I don't enter these guesses until I find something that clicks with me. Sometimes it takes me all six guesses, but I've had pretty good luck so far. Hopefully, this post won't break my streak.

Do you play Wordle or other word games? Feel free to share them in the comments.

Writers and Words

One of the books I'm currently reading is actually a trilogy that came out over a decade ago. I read the series when it originally came out, but I don't have the paper copies any more. When I saw the ebook version of trilogy advertised at a bargain price on Bookbub, I decided to grab it. Reading a trilogy isn't going to help me make up my book count for my Goodreads challenge, especially when it's a very long trilogy, but I'm already close to halfway done. My secret? I'm skipping or skimming the description.

In the prefaces to the first and second books, the author talks about her love of words, which started in childhood. She also loves worldbuilding, which results in pages and pages of description of even unimportant people and locations. Unfortunately, I'm the kind of reader who is more interested in the story than the setting. (I have to admit I forgot about this aspect of the series, or maybe it didn't bother me back then.) I wonder how well a new author with this amount of description would be able to sell her work to a traditional publisher today--or how well her work would fare if she self-published.

It's important for writers to develop their vocabularies so they know the proper definitions and connotations of words. There are words that are appropriate for a Victorian setting but not a futuristic one, and vice versa. As a creative writer, I acknowledge that other writers are free to experiment with language--and they should. I don't believe that writers should abstain from using adverbs and adjectives. But with my background in technical writing, I also want to keep my works easy-to-follow. I don't want to write the parts that readers are going to skip. Wordcraft is only one aspect of storytelling; story structure and character development are also important. Writers and readers may prefer different proportions of description and action. Perhaps book blurbs should do a better job of conveying style along with story. (Some do, but not all of them.)

In my opinion, Patricia McKillip is the champion of writing poetic prose that doesn't detract from the story. What other authors do you admire for their writing style? Do you think they'll still be read a hundred years from now, or will changes in our language make our current works inaccessible for future generations? Please comment below.