At the time, King was using a dedicated word processor-a big (huge, bulky, Brobdingnagian) machine that did only one thing: saved your typing on floppy disks. When King wrote his piece we were only in the beginnings of the personal computer age. Don’t stop and go looking for a ten-dollar word when a buck or a fiver will do the job.īut I will offer a wee (used in the sense of little) exception. When you’re first setting down your tale, you should do so as expeditiously (swiftly, rapidly, efficiently) as possible. Don’t do anything else but go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.Īnyway, I mostly agree with King. So much so that he has advice on another form of flow: King wants you to get that story down, in flow. But the context of this quote comes under the heading: Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. Some might call it bunk (balderdash, bosh, codswallop, twaddle). Well now! What are we to think … I mean, what are we to surmise, suppose, conjecture, conclude, and determine about Mr. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Stephen King has an oft-quoted opinion on this matter, as expressed in “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully-in Ten Minutes.” This article appears in the 1989 edition of The Writer’s Handbook, which I just happen to have on my shelf (you can also find King’s essay here). Which invites (not begs) the question: should a fiction writer use a thesaurus? Mr. Peter Mark Roget, a British physician and lexicographer). We even have a resource dedicated to word choices-the thesaurus (brainchild of Dr. We have a whole passel of them ( passel: a large number or amount). Which brings me to the subject of word choices. And it makes for a great insult: You borborygmic swine! That’ll stop a bad guy in his tracks! It’s an onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like the thing it describes (although onomatopoeia itself is definitely not an onomatopoeia). It means a “rumbling in the bowels caused by gas.” The one that has stayed with me for over forty years is borborygmus. The person who chose the word would get a point for every wrong guess. You got a point if somebody guessed your fake definition. You got a point if you guessed the correct definition. The object was to fool as many people in the game as you could. The other players made up fake definitions that sounded right. When it was your turn you’d look through the dictionary until you came across a word no one was familiar with. We cleverly called it “The Dictionary Game.” It was played with a big dictionary and scraps of paper. In college my roommates and I used to play a game with a dictionary.
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