I am going to disagree with Stephen King. Again.
A link to an interesting article popped up in my Facebook feed this week. Penned by Stephen King back in the mid-1980s, it was originally published in The Writer magazine under the title ‘Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes’.
It was a fine piece and King would go on to recycle some of it in his how-to-manual-cum-memoir On Writing. Point seven in that article has served as a sort of dictum for my writing life. I try to apply when creating my own fiction and when judging the fiction of others:
Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around.
If you are an aspiring author and would like an executive summary of all the good advice in On Writing, I highly recommend this article. But must I disagree with one line in it:
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.
Now, while I agree that having a dictionary and thesaurus to hand while composing a story is – to use King’s word – creepy, I have no issue with someone taking both off the shelf (or, more commonly these days, clicking ‘Tools’ in the Microsoft Word toolbar) during the editing process. Why? Because there is a difference between active and passive vocabulary.
‘Active vocabulary’ comprises the words that come freely to an author’s mind while he is composing. ‘Passive vocabulary’ consists of the words a person comprehends as a reader. In my case, there is quite a disparity between the two.
I have a tested passive vocabulary around the 95th percentile, but I know from frustrating experience that my active vocabulary is nothing close to that. Many times while writing I find myself groping for a word that I know exists (I can even state its definition), but I can never quite wrap my fingers around it. When this happens I tend to put in a placeholder word and then make a note to myself that it’s not quite the word I want. Often, during the rewrite, the word I was hunting for will come to me without a reference aid simply because I am not trying so hard to think of it (the human mind is obstinate like that). But if the pain persists, as they say in the commercials, I consult a thesaurus. And when I see the word I wanted it is a genuine relief, as if I’ve removed a splinter from my brain.
The thesaurus has developed a bad rap over the years due to misuse. ‘Writers’ who have not read enough to develop their vocabularies resort to a thesaurus to make their prose appear ‘smarter’. The problem with this is twofold: 1. Using bigger or more obscure words does not necessarily lead to better writing; 2. a person with a substandard vocabulary will most likely not understand the subtle differences between synonyms and will end up using a word that makes him or her look stupid.
It’s a good idea for novice writers to adhere to the rules – both the rules of grammar and the unofficial rules that experienced authors recommend – but it’s also important to remember that writing is a subjective experience. What works for one writer might not work for another, so don’t accept every pronouncement as gospel. Not even when it comes from his holiness, Stephen King.