The Strength of Common Words

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”—Ernest Hemingway.

The thesaurus is bad for your writing. The only acceptable use for the thesaurus for a writer is to recall that word that you know is exactly what you want, but can't quite remember. Even in these cases, you should only draw on the thesaurus in matters of extreme importance, otherwise if you can't quite remember the word that means the same thing as “energetic,” for instance, just put down “energetic” and move on. When you read back over your work you'll find it didn't really matter anyway; “energetic” plays just fine.

I'm disappointed every time I see a vocabulary post on all the different and better ways to say “happy” or “angry” or “sad.” I understand being excited by language—I feel it myself and encourage it in others—but nothing says happy quite like the word itself, or perhaps better yet, a smile or a laugh or an arm thrown around someone's shoulders.

Context communicates a great deal. One of the remarkable aspects of writing is that the total effect of a story, a scene, or even a thought, is greater than the collection of words that make it up. Big, ten-dollar words tend to keep me at arm's length from a story. Sure, I may enjoy the language for its own sake, but I won't feel close to any of the characters because the language draws too much attention to itself and distracts from the story.  Maybe you've felt that some.

I had a poetry workshop with a girl who adored words—obscure, archaic, flowery words. She wrote gems like “coquettish clouds” and “cast a pall.” I can't remember much of it because none of the poems made me feel a damn thing. They didn't even paint vivid images. If they were about much beyond the language (and I think she wanted them to be), I couldn't tell. She hid too much behind her fancy words. Her poems were uninteresting series of interesting words.

I am not arguing for anyone to dumb down their language. Write the way you want to write, that's style. I'm only advising you not to try so damn hard to punch above your weight. If you really feel your vocabulary is weak, read some more good books. Your writing is never going to sound natural if you always have to stop to look up shinier words. As long as your writing is sensible, that's what is important. It's enough work to maintain a consistent tone and focus and pacing through a story without also worrying about sowing linguistic pearls into your sentences every twenty to thirty words.

Be clear and write what you mean. That doesn't mean be stupid and flat footed. You can still turn word somersaults if you like, but it's important to know where and when in a story you can get away with such showy arrangements. If you want a moment to matter to a reader, trust in a light touch. The common, compact words that we all know so well are always the ones that knock us out. We all have so much invested in such words—they're familiar, so we never see the punch coming. 

I have never in my life been jubilant. Not once. But now and again, for a little while at least, I have been happy.