Category: vocabulary

I had half a thought about networking I was going to expand on, but as i started to write it out I remembered I just ranted about networking, well… not that long ago, relatively speaking. And I don’t want you all thinking I’ve only got three or four pieces of writing advice. So I’m skipping ahead to talk about zombies. Sort of.

Honestly, I’ve ripped this one apart and put it back together three times now.

I’ve talked once or thrice here on the ranty writing blog about using obscure words and overly-elaborate language. Usually in the negative sense, because this kind of stuff often throws up barriers between me and my readers. Best-case scenario is they have no idea what I’m trying to say. Worst-case is they get frustrated, maybe because they realize I’m just doing this to try to look clever, and they stop reading.

Well, they stop reading my work, anyway.

This doesn’t mean I should never use obscure or specialist words. It just means I need to be better about how and where I deploy them. Over the years I’ve come up with two simple rules-of-thumb for using obscure words or jargon in my books.

First, have there be an actual reason to use an obscure word. And no, showing off my vocabulary isn’t an actual reason. These words should fit the character, the situation, the world I’m trying to build. It should make sense and sound natural (within these guidelines).

Second, define it in the story. There’s a bunch of reasons something might need to be explained in a story. Plot reasons. Character reasons. If there’s a real reason to use this word or term my reader probably isn’t going to know, there’s a good chance someone in my story doesn’t know it either. Which means I have a believable reason to explain it. Keep in mind, that explanation can come in a number of ways, but it should get explained in a believable way.

ProTip on that last bit. I don’t want to fall back on “as you know” to explain things. Or a thinly-veiled version of it.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I do it, and I’ve seen other folks do it, too. Again, just a rule of thumb, but if I’ve used glabrous to describe a character… maybe I should see if these two rules apply.

Want some examples?

Okay, well, this is where the zombies come in.

Shaun of the Dead begins in Shaun’s favorite pub where his (very-soon-to-be-ex) girlfriend Liz is explaining why things aren’t working out between them. One of her big reasons is that they don’t ever get to do anything alone because Shaun rarely goes anywhere without his best friend Ed (who Liz insists she likes), which leads to her often inviting her flatmates along (who Shaun insists he likes) which only exacerbates things. Which then leads Shaun to ask… what does exacerbate mean?

Look at that. First, we’ve got the added subtext that Liz is a bit out of Shaun’s league, casually using a word she thinks s pretty straightforward and he admits he doesn’t know. Then we have the explanation, because Liz is trying hard to be gentle here, and, you know, let’s stay on track with the breakup talk, okay?

Or how about this one– remember when Doctor Who introduced the word petrichor to millions of sci-fi fans? Short version, Amy and Rory were trapped in a TARDIS gone mad and had to unlock a door with a telepathic lock. And one of the “keys” was the word Petrichor.

So here we are again. First, it makes sense this would be a slightly obscure word (and a scientific one) because it’s essentially a password in the Doctor’s time machine. And it makes sense that Amy and Rory have to be told exactly what the word means because they’re dealing with a telepathic lock—it’s not just looking at the word on a screen, it’s looking at the word in their minds, at their understanding of it.

Y’see, Timmy, there’s nothing wrong with rarely-used, obscure words in my manuscript. I just want to use them in ways that strengthen my story, not one that pushes my readers away. Because pushing readers away is… well, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of this, doesn’t it?

Oh, and one last thing. I hate to be that guy, but… well, it is award nomination season for things that came out in 2025. Nebulas, Locus, Hugos. If you were they type of person who nominated things and wanted to put up God’s Junk Drawer, the Combat Monsters anthology, or even just my specific story from it “The Night Crew”… well, I’d be grateful.

Next time… okay, look, next time you’re just going to have to trust me and go with this next one, okay?

Until then, go write.

Revisiting an older post with a Halloween themed post! Sort of! But still with lots of thoughts and (hopefully) informative tips and hints.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most of you are familiar with The Twilight Zone. It’s one of those lightning in a bottle things that people have tried to re-create again and again over the years. I think we’re up to… three remake series? And the movie?

During the ‘80s revival, they did a story called “To See The Invisible Man” (adapted by Stephen Barnes from an old Robert Silverberg short story). It’s about a man in a somewhat-utopian society whose asshole behavior gets him sentenced to a year of “public invisibility.” Key thing though…

They don’t actually turn him invisible. He just gets a small sort of implant-mark on his forehead that tells everyone to ignore him. That’s the curse of it. Everyone can see and hear him–and he knows they can– but no one’s allowed to react to him or anything he does. Even when he desperately needs to be acknowledged (I remember an eerie scene in a hospital emergency room after he’s been hit by a car), people just all pretend he’s not there. Even though they know he is.

Why do I bring this up?

In a weird way, this story’s kind of a metaphor for being a writer. The reader absolutely knows I’m there, that I’ve created this story, made up these characters, and chosen these individual words. But at the same time… they don’t want to admit that. They want to get caught up in the flow and immerse themselves in the story and pretend for an hour or an afternoon or a commute home that all of this is real. That it’s just them and the characters and the plot and I’m… not there. Not part of it.

It’s just my opinion, but I think one of the worst things a writer can do is draw attention to themselves in their writing. We need to be invisible. I mean, we want our characters to be seen. We want our dialogue to be heard. We want our action and passion and suspense to leave people breathless. But us—the writers? We’re just distractions. Less of us is more of the story. Being able to restrain myself is usually just as impressive as how excessive i could be.

So here are some ways not to be seen.

Vocabulary— A fair amount of would-be writers are determined to prove they’re cleverer than everyone else. More often than not, they latch onto (or look up) obscure and flowery words because they don’t want to use something “common” in their literary masterpiece. These folks write sprawling, impenetrable prose and all too often they’ll try to defend this habit by saying it’s the reader’s fault for having such a limited vocabulary. After all, I can easily picture a glabrous man in habiliments of titian and atramentous, not my fault you’re so basic.

Any word I’m choosing just to draw attention, to prove I don’t need to use a common word, is the wrong word. Any word that makes my reader stop reading and start analyzing is the wrong word. I can try to justify my word choice any way I like, but when my reader can’t figure out what’s being said for the fourth or fifth time and decides to put the book down and go get caught up on Haunted Hotel… well, there’s only one person to blame. And it’s not them.

Complication— This is kind of like the vocabulary issue. Sometimes folks try to prove how clever or artistic they are by creating overly-elaborate sentences or structuring their whole narrative in a needlessly complicated way. I mean, I once tried to read a book with—no joke—a three-page opening sentence. Yes, sentence.

If I have an actual reason for doing this sort of thing in this piece of writing, fantastic. But if not… why would I do something that makes my readers more and more aware they’re reading a book rather than letting them get immersed in it? My writing should be clean, simple, and natural.

Said— I just talked about this recently so I won’t spend a lot of time on it here, but said is invisible. People skim over said on the page. It’s fantastic that I know a hundred other dialogue tags, but save them for when they matter. If every single tag is the special one, then none of them are special. So I shouldn’t draw attention to myself with twenty different descriptors on the page when I could just use said.

Names. If I use them in moderation, names are invisible. They’re just shorthand for the mental image of a character. But any name that repeats too often becomes the name we see everywhere and then it becomes noise distracting my readers from, y’know, the things I’m actually trying to show them. When Dot talks to Bob and Bob talks to Dot and Dot calls Bob by name and Bob calls Dot by name and then Bob and Dot… I mean, personally I start flinching a bit at that point.

Y’see, Timmy, every time I make the reader hesitate or pause for a second, I’m breaking the flow of the story. I’m encouraging them to skim at best, put the manuscript down at worst. I never want my reader thinking about how much they’re enjoying the latest Peter Clines book—I don’t even want them to think about the fact that they’re reading. I just want them to be immersed in this world alongside Noah, Parker, Olivia, Sam, Josh, the Castaway, Ross, Dieter, Neith, and all the rest.

If I’m the one they’re looking at, something’s gone wrong.

Next time… I thought I’d stick with the Halloweenish theme and do something I’ve threatened you all with for a long time now. I’m going to talk about Resident Evil. A lot.

Oh! And this coming Tuesday night I’m going to be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego talking with Eric Heisserer about his fantastic new crime procedural-reincarnation book Simultaneous. You should stop by and check it out.

(and do your homework– go watch Resident Evil)

Until then, go write.

Well, I offered you all a chance to make requests and not one of you took me up on it. Which means I get to rant about whatever I want this week. If you want rants more focused to your particular needs right now, just let me know down below.

But for now…

Back in November I talked about my drafting process—taking something from that messy, ugly first draft through to something I’m not ashamed to show my beloved or friends or, well, my agent. One part of that was my third draft, where I tighten and cut. And guess what? I just finished my third draft of TOS two weeks ago. And I took a bunch of notes as I was going through, because I was planning ahead for this.

Also, keep in mind this isn’t one-size-fits-all advice. Your story is your story, and your writing process is your process. Like so much stuff I toss out here I’m showing you how I do things with the hope it’ll help you figure out how you should be doing things.

So let’s talk about some cuts I made.

First off, I did a basic spellcheck. I’ve talked about spellcheckers a lot, and about using them correctly. I go through the manuscript one click at a time, examining each and every word the spellchecker flags. I don’t just blindly agree to change everything it says is a mistake because… well, it’s usually wrong. For example, it doesn’t recognize a lot of given names, and definitely a lot of nicknames, so I had to check each of those (or add them to the dictionary in some cases). Then there were words it just didn’t have (cyborg? Still? Really?) and a few where it refused to recognize a more common, alternate spelling (which, if I really wanted to put the work in, could probably tell me exactly which dictionary was fed into this particular spellchecker).

Again, each and every word. Check all of it. I’d guess the breakdown ended up being around 35% actual mistakes, 65% things that were correct but it flagged as mistakes.

Also, a lot of the time while going through, I’d check the whole sentence. Was there a better word to use? A better way to phrase this? Maybe switch a name to a pronoun?

This spellcheck pass took close to a full work day for a 300 page book. Sound like a lot? I mean, it averages out to about a minute and a half per flagged word. Some were easy to zip past. Some took a minute or two as I double-checked spellings myself or considered other factors (like I was just talking about). Plus, to be completely honest, I think I slowed down a bit while I was eating lunch. And I stopped to use the bathroom twice. On company time! I know!!!

Anyway… after this, I started doing passes for passes for different words. Lots of different words.

Adverbs and adjectives are some obvious culprits. I’m not one of those “kill all adverbs” zealots, but I do think a lot of the time they can use a good pruning. I once got to talk with editor Pat LoBrutto and his advice was “one adverb per page, four adjectives.” Like any rule, I think there’s some flex room in there, and different situations will call for different things. But I also think a lot of times we do overuse adverbs and adjectives because we just don’t know the really, really good word we could be using.

Some of the words and phrases I look for are what a friend of mine called “somewhat syndrome.” For me, it usually kicks in when a character says, for example, Yakko stood six foot four. It sounds too precise for a casual observation, right? Weirdly exact. So we write things like “Yakko stood a little over six feet” or “he was around six feet” or “stood a bit taller than six feet.” I used to do this a lot, with pretty much every description of anything, and it still show up sometimes when I’ve got a sort of casual, limited third person POV. So I search for a lot of things like about, kind of, sort of, around

There’s also a bunch of phrases that we tend do toss in, but we’re not using them correctly. Looked like, appeared to be, seemed to be, and constructions like that. These feel like the somewhat words and phrases I just mentioned, but almost all of these are part of an implied contradiction. Yakko looked like he was over six feet tall (but it was all just high boot heels). The door appeared to be made of wood (but was actually a veneer over steel plate). The car seemed to be in working order (but would fall apart if you drove it more than ten miles). See what I mean? What I probably want to say here is just Yakko was over six feet tall, the door was made of wood, and the car was in working order. So I should cut some extra words (that I wasn’t using correctly anyway) and just say that.

Also, there’s a bunch of verbs that have… well, they’re verbs we inherently associate with certain things. I shrug my shoulders. Nod my head. Point with my finger. I mean, it’s so understood if I told you “I pointed across the room”… well, what would you think I was pointing with? Which means those are all extra words. Just shrug. Just nod. Just point. You can probably think of a few, too.

Finally, there’s a bunch of words that fall into different categories and… look, they’re pretty much always good words to take a second look at. Very. Just. Rather. Really. Actually. Of course. Quite. So. Began to. Suddenly. I think some of these Benjamin Dreyer has pointed at (with his finger) as words you can almost always cut.

And yes, for the most part, these are going to be small cuts. But small cuts add up. When I was done making pass after pass for all these words and phrases… I’d effectively cut twelve pages out of my manuscript. Over three thousand words.

Want a few quick examples?

I cut 196 uses of very.

Also cut 141 uses of really.

And 139 maybes.

118 uses of kind of.

86 uses of about.

80 arounds.

Going off a standard 250 words per page for a double-spaced manuscript, that’s three pages gone right there.

Now in all fairness, every one of these wasn’t just that specific word. Sometimes while doing a pass and looking at everything (because, like with spellcheck, I don’t want to just delete everything that comes up), I’d realize I could reword a sentence, or maybe reword one and delete another. For example, out of those 196 words that vanished in the very pass, I’d guess maybe only 100-120 of them were the word “very” and the rest were other things.

Also, a small tip. Have you ever done find-and-replace on something and then discover you’ve accidentally created a bunch of mistakes throughout your manuscript? Like, you decide maybe Beth should be named Liz, but then discover her girlfriend now studies Elizalizan playwrights? Same principle holds here. I don’t want to just delete every very, for example, because then I’m also going to mess up every, everyone, delivery, slavery, recovery, and more.

And again… yeah, this is slow work. Slow, boring work. That’s what editing is a lot of the time. But it’s also a chance to sharpen things. Concentrate them. To make this hit a little harder and that get a bigger thrill. Editing might not be as thrilling as that initial raw creation, but I still get some creative joy out of it.

And I bet you will, too.

Also, I just realized I used this title for an editing post about twelve and a half years ago. What a hack.

Next time, unless somebody has a topic or question they’d rather I blather on about, I’m probably going to talk about the first time I saw Yakko Warner.

Until then, go write.

Okay, yes, I said I was only going to do this biweekly now but this is me posting for the third week in a row. I messed up my schedule/lost track of time because… look, life is a mess sometimes. And now I’m trying to play catch-up because some of these were planned to come out on certain days and I want to pretend this is still slightly relevant.

Point is, the ranty writing blog is still biweekly. Mostly. With only a few exceptions.

Anyway…

If you’ve been following along here for any amount of time, you know I’m a big believer in the rules of writing. Yes, there are rules. No, I don’t care what they said. There are rules and we have to learn them.

Now, granted, most of these rules are just in place to make sure we don’t end up in a metaphorical car crash before we’ve gotten any real experience. It’s like that driver ed instructor who screams at you to keep your hands at nine-and-three on the steering wheel. That’s a real thing. They’re not wrong to teach it and there’s reasons we need to learn it. But eventually we’re going to hit a point where we understand that a lot of the time we can relax a little bit while we’re driving. And that there are still absolutely times we want to keep two hands on the wheel.

One solid rule is spelling. Spelling’s important because that’s how we identify a word. If my readers can’t identify the word I’m using, they can’t understand what I’m trying to say. And if they can’t understand what I’m trying to say, well… It’s going to be tough to get them interested in what my characters are going through.

Of course, some folks will arrgue that spelling doesn’t really matter. I mean, really all those spellings were just made up anyway, right? Some random guy decided this was the right way to spell it and we all just went along with it. It’s not a rule. I don’t have to spell things that way. People wil figure out what I mean from context.

Maybe? Y’see, one of the other cool things spelling does is it lets us keep readign without any intruptions. Every time we notice a misspelled word, our brains sort of trip fir a moment. It might not completely knock us out of the story, but it breaks the flow a bit. And after the flow gets broken again and again… well, we’re not reading the stor yany more, we end up auditing it. Watching for the next typo to land

A solid follow up here is vocabulary in general. Sometimes I may know how to spell a ward, but I don’t actually know what it means. Other times I may know what it means, but I’m not entirely sure how to spell it… and maybe I’ve accidentally spilled something else instead.

You probably noticed both of these things in the past few paragraphs, didn’t you? Ha ha ha, he’s talking about spelling and he’s got typos. And that’s kind of my point. It knocked your brain out of reading mode. You were still working your way through the paragraphs, but it wasn’t a casual, gliding-along thing, was it? And that’s just here on a random blog post where I’m not really trying to draw you in. Imagine if you’d been trying to read a story?

Thank goodness for spellchecker, right?

Welllllllllll…

Here’s the problem. A spellchecker wouldn’t notice half the mistakes up above. I know, because I ran this post through mine. See, a spellchecker will notice a word that’s blatantly spelled wrong, but it won’t register a word that’s spelled correctly but being used wrong. For or fir? Ward or word? Spelling or spilling? A spellchecker doesn’t see a problem with any of these, so it doesn’t care which one I’m using.

But my reader? They’re going to notice. I mean, you noticed, right? Every one of those, ping, ping, ping

Well, that’s no problem, says random guy #23. I’ll just use one of those more advanced grammar programs, or maybe even an AI. They’ll understand the difference between a preposition and a noun. They’ll know the word I want.

Ha ha ha haa haaaaaa no they won’t. Sorry.

Kameron Hurley recently told a cute story on Bluesky about how she was looking through a blog about dentistry and the writer had capitalized the word tartar through several articles. When she asked why, the response was basically an internet shrug and “Grammarly told me to.” Because Grammarly can’t understand the difference between tartar (the build up on your teeth) and Tartar (an Asian ethnicity). This is a supposedly expert grammar program that doesn’t understand capitalization can drastically change the meaning of words. Which also should make you wonder about giving your Polish glassware a good polish, or that fine china you got in China.

Really, the more most of these assorted systems offer to do, the less they’re often capable of doing. I mean, heck, how many times have you gone looking for a specific book on Amazon and the algorithm instead recommends random Blu-rays? Or camping equipment? Or an anime t-shirt? None of these are bad things, but they’re definitely not what I asked the algorithm to find for me.

Again, spellcheck can’t solve all my spelling problems. A grammar program isn’t going to understand a lot of grammar situations. And this really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Human languages are complex, and English is one of the messiest, most confounding languages there is. Sometimes it’s hard for people to grasp subtext and nuance or even just basic meaning. So the idea that some guy threw together a machine that can understand all of that better than most people…?

Well, I mean, we’ve been talking about how they don’t. They just don’t. Sorry.

Let me be clear. I still use spellchecker all the time. But I’m not expecting it to do the work for me. It does help me catch the odd blatant misttake that crops us—and usually a lot faster than I could—but it also labels a lot of other things in my story as mistakes that aren’t. I still have to keep an eye on it and make sure it’s not screwing up. I don’t assume every correction or suggestion is right, and most of the time they aren’t.

Y’see, Timmy, too many folks get a result from a spellchecker or some half-baked LLM and they immediately accept it. It has to be right because… well, it’s a computer. It knows everything, right? That’s what decades of sci-fi has taught us. Computers are never wrong. Computers is geniuses.

This is why I need to know how to spell. I need to have a good vocabulary. Because ultimately, I’m the one who needs to be doing the writing if I want it to be my writing, saying what I want it to say.

As they said in the Princess Bride, anyone who says differently is spelling something.

Next time… well, crap, if I get back to biweekly posts, next time will be Halloween, so I guess we’ll talk about something scary. Or something we want to be scary, anyway.

Until then, go write.