I stole Stephen King’s book from the library.
It was enjoyable and excellent.
It was easy to read.
I breezed through page after page of golden insight, only pausing for the audible “ah-hah” or deep breath as something King wrote hit home.
Like most accomplished writers, King urges his fellow brethren to read as much as possible. Inhale books and learn from them. This isn’t earth-shattering news.
Until he makes a new argument.
Read bad writing.
King goes into some level of detail as to what constitutes bad writing, but he focuses much of his attention on the subtext and content. I filed this note away in my mind and didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t disagree with King, but I didn’t know what to do with that information.
It happened by accident.
I had joined a group where writers were eager to share their work. Some wanted feedback. Some just wanted to be read. Most followed the same pattern.
Eventually, I found that pattern elsewhere, and it made my stomach turn.
Years earlier, I had started writing a piece of work that, to this day, has remained unfinished. The beginning always stuck with me out of sheer nostalgia, where I insisted that, if I were to ever complete this project, that opening scene would remain as unchanged as possible. It would serve as a reminder that “this is where it started.” “It” being a metaphor for both the story and my own journey.
When I saw the pattern in the written work of others, I had two sickening realizations. The first is that the writing was bad. The second is that it was exactly how I wrote.
As painful of a moment as this was, it reinforced what King had suggested. We may want to be the next good writer, but it’s also important to avoid being the next bad one. This was bad, and I was doing it.
The obvious value of finding mistakes is the ability to correct them. What I was doing may have been flawed, but it wasn’t set in stone. Still, like so many other elements of creative work, it’s hard to see a solution if you don’t even see the problem.
So, let’s identify the problem. The following passage was written roughly eight years ago and probably six or seven years before I saw my mistake:
My emotions had been kneaded like raw dough for the past few months and thanks to a continual myriad of small offenses, I had reached my tipping point. Oscillating between the hatred of my monotonous days and the fear of letting go of the last sliver of stability in my otherwise increasingly flawed life, I found no other alternative than to tear down and rebuild.
I won’t sit here and berate my writing. We all look back on prior work and see it differently now. The point of this exercise is that one extremely obvious approach is being used. And failing.
I wrote big words.
“Big” as in long. “Big” as in complicated. “Big” as in the flex of my muscles as I proudly type “like a writer.”
“Big” as in distracting.
There’s a decent chance that you didn’t even read the entire entry.
Think about your own experiences with a book. Every so often, you’ll double back on the same paragraph or sentence you just read. You’ll re-read and, even then, possibly miss something.
That’s not the reader’s fault.
Somewhere in that troublesome prose, the writer lost track of the message, too. It became more about the word choice than the word’s purpose.
Almost all writers start out on their own. Maybe there are friends and family who will read and give honest feedback — this is far less likely than people realize — and maybe the writer joined a group as I mentioned earlier. Regardless, the initial words are usually produced when the writer is alone, and the first editor is the mind as the fingers are typing.
Removing big words is one of the first, easiest edits to make when a draft is complete.
The irony is that using big words is often a desire by writers. We want to show the range of our vocabulary. We pretend that a robust vocabulary is part of the art. That someone will read our work and recognize beauty on the page.
The words are the paintbrush. What they create is the art.
The other surprising realization that struck me after joining the group of writers is that I could pinpoint why so many of us subconsciously insist on using big words. We are trying to impress fellow writers.
It’s a dangerous spiral. As I wrote earlier, many writers are also readers, but they are not the same person when circumstances change.
A writer reading a book for leisure is a reader. A writer reading book for education is a writer.
Perhaps this subtle shift gives the impression of “power,” where we want to appeal to the educator. This doesn’t raise the bar. It shifts the focus in the wrong direction.
Reading may be more “active” of a hobby than watching television, but it is still a “passive” experience in that it requires no additional input. Most readers aren’t looking to keep a dictionary nearby when submerging themselves into text.
I am far from the first person to suggest that big words are more a hindrance than a help. People have frequently argued that it’s best to write for a younger reading level. It may seem counterintuitive at first, but some of the greatest written works contain the simplest of language — The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is one such example.
If you need further proof based on your own tendencies, I urge you to go back to some of your earliest work. Don’t rip it apart. First, see if you wrote with an unnecessary amount of big words.
Then — and more importantly — see if those words flow well. See if they cause you to stumble. If so, try rewriting the same entry but without the flowery words. I’ll do the same for exercise. I’ll rewrite my original snipped I showed above without all the unnecessary fluff.
Finally, if you want to see the reverse in action, then I’ll leave you with the following iconic scene from an iconic show. It is the episode of Friends where Joey writes a letter of recommendation for Chandler and Monica to potentially adopt a child — Season 10, Episode 5.
The hook is that Joey uses a thesaurus to sound smart.
He uses the thesaurus on basically every word.
Credit: @amelia_epi on Twitter
As promised, I will rewrite the original passage based on its intent, but without using big words:
I had reached my tipping point. It wasn’t one issue. Or three. It was a slow stack that grew over time and pushed me to the brink. The brink of doing something bold and stupid and terrifying all at once. That’s what happens when you feel the only way to move forward is to tear down and start again.
Eventually, I found the book I stole from the library. I paid in full to replace it, and I now have a copy of On Writing by Stephen King with a Dewey Decimal Classification on the spine.