Tag Archives: chap

Chap

Chap: (n) A true gentleman

Writers are insane from spending too much time in their own brain–drunk on the intoxicant of finding new words to make great phrases.

Often in writing a story line, when you’ve used “he, man, guy and fellow” so many times that you know the reader must be gagging, you go to the Thesaurus and look for other terms for the same idea.

You often land on a word like “chap.”

No one actually refers to another person as “a chap.” Even in England, you probably would not find many people pointing at others and saying, “Now, there’s a fine chap.”

But in a pinch, a writer who wants to extend his story by one more paragraph and needs a variable to describe a male figure will insert the word “chap,” hoping that the person reading his or her novel will overlook it and move along to the next verb.

It is in that moment when you know the writer has run out of words before running out of ideas.

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Bloke

Bloke: (n) a man; a fellow.

Dictionary B

There is an unwritten rule of writing. (That sounds like an oxymoron.)

What I’m saying is that normally in the process of writing five hundred words, you try not to repeat any word more than once (which I just did).

So if for some reason, your story is talking about a fellow, or some guy, and you decide not to give this gentleman a name, then you are forced to come up with a series of words which represent a male.

It’s what I call “Roget Writing”–when you look up different ideas for the same thing in the thesaurus, in order to appear clever.

It is not only difficult and clumsy, but can become quite comical–because after you’ve used, “man, guy, fellow, chap, and dude,” you start considering inserting the word “bloke.”

Even though the person is not from “Down Under,” you take the risk anyway.

It’s one of those things that makes you look like an amateur, when the better solution is to give your character a name so you don’t have to keep describing him using as many macho representations as available.

 

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