Lisa K. Buchanan
A BUZZWORD-FREE ZONE
Even I—as a patient—am weary of first-person cancer narratives. This again. How then to share my personal experience meaningfully without imposing on the reader’s (and my own) language fatigue?
When writing “Thank you, Coco Chanel” (Issue #49), I banished words commonly featured in first-person accounts of my widely discussed topic: biopsy, diagnosis, surgery, radiation, chemo, side effects, death, and the six-letter c-word itself. This came about intuitively, though in retrospect, I seem to have kept an informal list in my mind.
Freed from the daily experience of the present, I considered the cultural history that preceded me. Fashionista Coco Chanel had become a poster girl for suntanning in the 1920s and the trend was still strong when I was a Southern California teen fifty years later. The risk for melanoma, a potentially fatal cancer associated with sun-damaged skin, was not yet widely publicized. The absence of the usual words helped me get my piece out of the medical clinic and onto the beach for sun-worshipping, a seemingly healthful recreation that rendered me vulnerable.
My omission of the expected words—and the scenes frequently centered on them—also encouraged metaphor. Not dark mole, but solar eclipse. Not diagnostic growths on scans, but stars. Not metastases, but constellations. Not death, but a return to element.
Like this idea for a buzzword-free flash piece of your own? List some common words particular to your topic; add to those by consulting existing coverage, including marketing copy (headlines, subheads, book jacket descriptions). Make a playful rule for yourself to banish these words from your piece. Newly free of the expected terminology, see what the absence yields.
Lisa K. Buchanan lives in San Francisco. “Thank You, Coco Chanel” was a Semi-finalist in Cleaver’s 2024 Short CNF Contest. Her writings can also be found in CRAFT, The Citron Review, and at www.lisakbuchanan.com. Current favorite book: The Employees by Olga Ravn.
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