I could never, never separate the words from everything else. I can see the forest for sure, but I can't neglect the trees. Because the minute qualities of the trees are what make the forest, aren't they? If there are a lot of deformed, diseased trees...the forest looks a certain way, without getting into the types of trees they are. That is the definitions of the words--the type of tree, whether it is a pine or a maple. But it is the qualities of those trees that define the forest, at least as much as the types.
What Virginia Woolf also said in the same speech/interview that jordan's talking about is that words do not exist alone--they exist in sentences, in paragraphs, as parts of a greater whole rather than as isolated organisms. A sentence, a paragraph, a novel or an essay--it is a massive symbiotic relationship. Not a bunch of fragments pieced together. For me, words flow into each other--the sounds, the meaning, everything. The way they work together is a part of the story itself, for me.
I think Jordan and I are talking about the same thing here. It's not about throwing together nice-sounding sentences with pretty sounds--it's about choosing words that affect and alter each others' meanings, and they work towards the character and they work towards the tone. And if you were to read it out loud to someone who didn't speak English, it would still create that same effect, that same tone. So that the sounds, the words at their most basic, are supporting tone, they are supporting character, they are supporting story--they are a built-in soundtrack, they cue readers to emotions without the readers ever realizing it.
