I majored in creative writing at university and it was the one time in my life when I was part of a ‘writers’ circle’. Gareth, Gavin and I all wrote speculative fiction and we used to take each other’s work home to critique it and then discuss it between lectures. In one story – I have no idea what it was now – I used the word ‘lugubrious’. Next to it, in tiny block capitals, Gavin had written: I NEED A DICTIONARY NOW!
In those days I was resistant to editorial suggestions and I challenged Gavin on his criticism. I said something like, “Why should I dumb down my story just because someone doesn’t know what lugubrious means?”
“It sounds pretentious,” he shot back.
The question of vocabulary in writing is a tricky one. In recent times there has been a trend away from using ‘big’ words, stemming from the argument that people reading on digital devices will abandon a story if there are too many polysyllabic words in it. This is totally specious, of course, and symptomatic of a creative world increasingly at the mercy of the bottom line.
Over the years I have subscribed to something comic book doyenne Stan Lee once said: “If a kid has to go to a dictionary, that’s not the worst thing that could happen.” As both an author and a magazine editor, I have refused to under-estimate the intelligence of my audience. Someone who likes to read is not going to be alienated if there’s a word whose definition they have to glean from context or look up later.
But Gavin was right. My use of lugubrious was, in that instance, poor writing.
Writing is not about using big words, it’s about using the right words. Those words might be small or big, they might be plain or exotic. What they shouldn’t be is an extension of the writer’s ego. While I’m no fan of H. P. Lovecraft or Ray Bradbury, it’s clear their large vocabularies were not an affectation; they wrote that way because that was how their internal voices told them to write. Ernest Hemingway was the opposite: he used simple language, but that never felt contrived or artificial, either.
A short while ago I was asked to edit the major work of a top English student. I was a little apprehensive, remembering the standard to which I was able to write at 17 or 18, but I needn’t have been. She proved to be a genuine talent, and once I’d whittled away 1000 words of over-description and tidied up some phrasing, what remained was the second draft of a story that could grace the pages of any literary journal in Australia. But twice during the editing process I came across a word I had never seen before.
Now, I’ve been reading my whole life, writing since I was ten, and have a tested passive vocabulary in the 95th percentile, so it’s not often I encounter a word that leaves me completely flummoxed. Later, while discussing the edits with this student’s teacher, I intimated that the problem wasn’t so much the words themselves as the effect they had on me as a reader. They were so obscure and out of place that they acted like a speed bump in the narrative. Instead of sharing the horrors of a couple caught up in the Bosnian conflict, I was suddenly thinking, Someone needs to put away her thesaurus. And then, almost subconsciously, I scribbled in the margin, I need a dictionary now!
An uncommon word that is also the right word will not interrupt the narrative flow this way. I hasten to add that it wasn’t really the student’s fault; throughout most of our schooling we are rightly encouraged to exercise and extend our vocabularies, and only when we start dabbling in the world of publishing do we discover we’re not going to win awards because our stories contain words like feculent or efflorescence.
Usually whether a word is right or not will depend on the context. Take this as an example:
The car in the next lane swerved across and John had to slam on the brakes. He bashed the steering wheel. “Fuckin’ Asian drivers! No doubt about ’em.”
Deidre rolled her eyes and then looked out the window. Such jejune observations never stopped tumbling out of her husband’s mouth.
Jejune isn’t a common word; you won’t find it in the works of James Patterson, I’m pretty sure. Yet in the above example, a reader can cotton to its meaning without too much difficulty. He or she won’t stop and puzzle over it, as if it were some weird specimen retrieved from the depths of the Amazon basin, while the word itself adds colour to the prose that would otherwise be absent if a synonym such as ‘ignorant’ or ‘naïve’ were used.
It’s natural for someone who loves words to want to learn as many as possible and then use them wherever possible. But the story and the desired effect from a particular sentence should be the author’s guide to word usage, big or small, not their ego or some marketing twerp who has never read a book – or an e-book – in his life.