let's say someone were to take a short story (idk, let's just take "The Ones Who Walk Away from the Omelas" for instance--why? not sure, it's the first one that came to mind *shrug*). and that person were to paste it into a word document (or, for my preferences, google docs), and comb through every word of it. and with every word, as best as possible, they changed it to a synonym. each and every word that had a plausible synonym. could this possibly change the dynamic/thrust of the entire story? it seems, to me, that some writers pick very specific word choices to evoke a very specific tone, atmosphere, emotion, or image they wish to convey, so that literally any synonym will not provide the specific intent in quite the same way, so that it's not as satisfying to the writer, because it won't evoke the exact response the writer is looking for from the reader. how true would you say this is, for you, at least? how true, if you were to speculate, might this be for authors who you well enough to know that they are this meticulous in their phrasing?
I am extremely conscious of this. Not only do I want to impart a specific thought or idea with my word choice, but I am very clear that the right word changes the tone of that moment in my story, and helps to define which characters are acting. I'm sitting here doing it right now. Working on an intense scene where one of my characters has done something terrible and is facing judgement from a very powerful entity. I've changed the intent and tone of several of the sentences of dialogue by just choosing different synonyms which fit the speaking style of each character to make them different. My first character is of a lower social class, so his words aren't haughty at all. The higher entity he is challenging is the ruler of this particular realm, so his verbiage is a bit more sophisticated. I also do this to describe the room these entities are in. It's supposed to be a dark and dreary place, but rather than say that, I can describe the atmosphere in very specific "visual" synonyms that have more impact, like oppressive or bleak, which adds weight to the feel of it. So yeah, I think you could change the basic tone of a story and perhaps change the perception of it by doing that. But I also think the flow would suffer. The right synonym also works within the sentence in regard to how a reader "hears" it in their head. The wrong word can change the tempo or flow dramatically and ruin what was intended.
There is a reason why I insist that a dictionary of synonyms is not a proper thesaurus, regardless of what many publishers try to foist off on us today as thesauri. That's the reason why as I write this I have seven (7) "real" Roget's thesauri on my desk (Okay -- it's really only six, because two of them are copies of the same edition.)
