(no subject)

[runespoor]

God I hate how limited my vocabulary is in English.

Hate it.

10'000 words of fic to bash my skull against because god, I'm always using the same words.

HATE.

Comments

[outlawpoet.livejournal.com]

Hey, not everybody is a crazy-making up words-person like Shakespeare. Maybe you're meant to be a person of direct, clear vocabulary. Take heart from this exchange from probably the two greatest writers of last century:

"Hemingway," Faulkner said once, "has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

Hemingway replied, "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

[runespoor7.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know it's possible to write beautifully that way. It tends not to be my favourite, especially for longer stories, though. But I hate being unable to choose how I'm going to tell my story. It's not a question of big words. Often the big words actually come more easily, because they tend to be derived from Latin and so is French, and when I'm tired enough it makes a difference in how quickly the words come.

I find myself describing the same actions (people moving, for instance) with exactly the same words. And I know there are other words, or other phrases, out there, but I have to look for them. "Sling an arm around someone's shoulder" works fine, but I never remember that "throw" works just as well unless I spend time thinking about it. I have no idea how to prevent "make a show of" from making more than one appearance. Every time I type "twitch" or "jerk", I know there's a handful of verbs I'm forgetting about again. And so on, and so forth.

And that's without counting the words that are going to come up a lot because of the things I, as a writer, tend to focus on to picture reactions, the things people are looking at or their smiles ("smirk" and "smile": I never stop feeling like I overuse them.)

tl;dr version: I'm whining.