Category: vocabulary

            Y’know, while I was pulling links for this post, I realized something kind of amazing (and I’m glad I caught it).  This is the 300th time I’ve posted on this page.  Three hundred ranty posts about characters and dialogue and spelling and structure. Wow.

            I’m kind of surprised we’re all still here.
            But let’s get back to it…
            Odd fact—I’ve probably fired more types of handguns and rifles than anyone reading this.  You might be a firearm enthusiast, you might be former military, you might be in the military now… but there’s a very good chance I’ve got you beat.  I once compared notes with an Army weapons specialist and it turned out I could name almost twice as many firearms than him that I’d used, including a few obscure ones he’d never even heard of.

            The reason why I can do this is all my time in the film industry.  With the different procedural and crime shows I worked on, it was very common to have a new murder weapon every week, along with a red herring weapon and possibly some random thug weapons as well. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, bolt action, lever action, pump, semi-auto, full-auto…  And every one of these that was actually used on screen had to be test fired by me and then by the actors. 

            Even with some common weapons repeating, over the course of fifteen years… I fired a lot of weapons.

            Now, with all that being said, even though I’ve worked with a ton of weapons, I would never consider myself any kind of marksman.  Definitely not a sniper.  Because there is much, much more to being good with weapons then just being able to pull a trigger.  An AK-47 might seem like a ticket to badass-dom, but not if I don’t know how to load it. Or hold it.  Or turn the safety off.  I’ve heard some great (and kind of awful) stories from soldiers about gunfights with people who don’t know how their own weapons work.

            I bet a few folks reading this have an acquaintance who buys nothing but the most expensive, top-of-the-line tools yet still can’t put an IKEA bookshelf together.  Most of us have heard stories about some guy who spends a quarter-million on a car and then wrecks it within a week because “the car outperformed the driver.” Heck, we’ve all seen proof that giving a director access to grade-A actors and millions in film technology is absolutely no guarantee of a decent movie.

            Y’see, Timmy, having high-level tools doesn’t automatically make me skilled.  They’re two entirely different things.  Sure, I can keep jabbing at that bookshelf with my $300 DeWalt Max XR  20 volt hammer drill, but if I just need to tap in a few finishing nails it’s not going to help much. And the parts the drill would actually work for… well, a Phillips head screwdriver would do the same job.  It might even work better, all things considered.  DeWalt’s are great, but they can kind of suck when you need to work in tight spaces.

            Anyway… where am I going with this?

            I’d like to share something with you.  As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, I used to work on a text-based online game, what some of you might know as a MUD.  Because it was text-dependent, it was a chance for some people to really show off their skills.  Or complete lack thereof.  A friend of mine still works there and sometimes she shares things with me.

            So, check out this sentence…

            (names have been changed to protect the horribly guilty)

“Lashes aflutter like the wings of a satin bird, Phoebe sets glaukosphaerite lagoons on the newcomer, a smirk glissading across twin folds.”

             WTF…

            Now, I was going to try to sift through this sentence and break down all the places it went wrong.  To be honest, I did.  And I had a page and a half of notes, which is a lot more negativity than I want to have here.  So, instead, let me break all of that down into four simple rules for your writing arsenal.

            And yes, these would be rules, not advice.

            Know what words mean—It doesn’t matter how much my reciprocal saw cost if I keep trying to use it as a butter knife.  An elephant gun is not a sidearm.  And diffuse and defuse mean two entirely different things.

            This is the most important of these rules.  If I want to make my living with words, I need to know them intimately.   Not more or less what they mean or a general idea of how they’re used.  I cannot say words are the tools of my trade and then get repeatedly stumped by vocabulary questions on Jeopardy!. I’ve been doing this for many years, full time for over eight now, and I still pick up the dictionary once or thrice a week to make sure I’m using a given word correctly.  Because I have to know what they mean.

            This is also one of the worst rules to get wrong because it’s a mistake that’s hard to catch.  I won’t catch it because, well, I don’t know I’m using the word wrong.  My computer won’t catch it, because computers are idiots and will only tell me if a word’s spelled right, not if it’s being used correctly. Which means the readers will probably be the ones to catch it… and it won’t give them a good opinion of my skills as a writer.

           

            Don’t overcomplicate—Stephen King once said that any word you go looking for in the thesaurus for is the wrong word.  I’ve mentioned a few different versions of this rule at one time or another.  I’m not saying my writing can’t have some clever bits to it, but I should never confuse (or equate) overcomplicating my writing with complexity in my writing.

            If I have metaphors for metaphors (like using lagoons instead of pools because I don’t want to use eyes), I am pushing my audience away from reading and into analysis.  This is the kind of thing that destroys the flow of my writing.  And that’s the kind of thing that gets my writing set aside in favor of something else.

            Know how things go together—Remember that AK-47?  It’s not going to be half as effective after I force a lot of shotgun shells into the magazine.  They’re two powerful items that do not work well together.

            Know what words mean—Did I mention this one already? Well, it’s probably worth mentioning again.  It is the most important of these rules after all.  And the one most people will ignore, because I need to be able to admit I don’t know stuff before I can learn new stuff.

            Have a big arsenal of words because you need it and you can use it.  Not just because you think it makes you look cool.  I can spend twenty minutes looking up glaukosphaerite and making sure it’s spelled correctly (because it won’t be in the spellchecker), but I could also just use green and then finish this whole page in that same amount of time. 

            And more people would understand what I was trying to say.

            Next time, I wanted to tell you about something I’ve felt for a while now…

            Until then, go write.

            Amazon’s Shelfari service sent me an interesting email alert the other day.  It seems their algorithms had found a new character in Ex-Patriots and wanted to let me  know it was being added to the list on Shelfari.  What character had they found?

            St. George of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

            I’d just glanced back at the book recently, so it only took me a moment to figure out where they’d found this.  From page 89 in the paperback version…

             This is why the algorithm also added characters like “boss,” Douglas Adams (mentioned in a conversation), and my college roommate John who I thanked in the afterword for his technical help on the book.  A computer doesn’t actually understand language and context.  It can go over the book mechanically, looking for specific patterns, but it can’t see these patterns in the bigger picture.  Or the bigger sentence, in some cases.

            This is also a great example of why I would never trust a computer to write for me.

            Yet a lot of would-be writers do trust their computers.  And other people’s computers.  They use subroutines and apps and websites to do all the hard work for them.  They never bother to learn how to spell—or even what some words mean—and just remain confident a machine will catch all of that for them.  It’s the literary equivalent of choosing to walk with a crutch over training to run a race. 

            And it’s hard to say I’m dedicated to being a professional runner when I announce I’ve decided to keep using the crutch.  People will have trouble taking me seriously.  And, speaking as someone who was stuck with one for a while, moving with a cane or crutch gets dull really fast.  For everyone.  Take that as you will.

            I mentioned last time that I was going to bring up some words every author needed to know.  Are you ready for them?  The words I should absolutely, no-questions know if I want to call myself a writer…

            All.  Of.  Them.

            Words are our tools and our raw materials.  Our bricks and mortar.  Our paint and brush.  A surgeon doesn’t use the same blade for everything and a chef doesn’t use the same spices in every meal.  A huge part of the reason we consider people to be professionals is because they know the tools of their trade.  If I want people to consider me a professional writer, I need to know words.  All words.  I need to know how to spell them, what they mean, and how to use them.
            Oh, sure, I can string some words together and argue that people will get most of it from context.  Maybe sometimes I’ll even get an emotional response (the one I was intending).  But this is crude, base communication.  It’s campfire stories that depend on a loud scream at the end to deliver their punch.

            Which brings us, as always, to the list…

            Here’s a bunch of words that sound kind of similar but all have very different meanings.  Some of them are different parts of speech.  Some of them are homonyms.  Some of them aren’t (which is even more embarrassing).  More to the point, a spellchecker will accept all of them as correct… no matter how I’m using them.

            As usual, every one of these is a mistake that I saw in print. They were all in news articles or short stories or books.  All of them were seen by thousands (or is a few cases, dozens) of readers.  In all fairness, one of them is a mistake I made in an early draft that went out to my beta readers and they all rightfully mocked me for it.

            How many of them do you know?

alter vs. altar

balled vs. bawled

Calvary vs. cavalry

censer vs. censor

cruller vs. crueler

explicit vs. implicit

instants vs. instance

manners vs. manors

past vs. passed

wrecking vs. wreaking

rational vs. rationale

packed vs. pact

bale vs. bail

raise vs. raze

phase vs. faze

lamb vs. lam

isle vs. aisle

pus vs. puss

            

            Did you know all of them?  Both sides?  None of these are obscure or unusual.  I’m willing to bet most of you reading this have used at least one of them today.  I think I’m already up to five or six.

            If I want to call myself a writer, it’s important that I know the tools and raw materials I’m using.  All of them.  Because if I’m talking about the rational the bad guys have for wrecking havoc on stately Wayne Manner while Alfred balled his eyes out…

            Well, I don’t look like someone who should be making a living with words, that’s for sure. 

            Next time, I might be a little late while I try to get these rewrites to my editor.  But once that’s done, I’d like to talk a bit about how I’ve chosen to end my latest rant each week.

            Until then, go write.

            I’m kind of on a roll right now with the new book, so—if you don’t mind—I’m just going to make a quick observation and get back to it.  Next week I’ll prattle on for far too long like I normally do.

            So… said with the golden rule firmly in mind

            Worrying if all the words are right in a first draft is a lot like worrying if I’m getting a band or a DJ for my wedding when I’m not dating anyone.  It just doesn’t matter at this stage.  If I keep obsessing over those later elements, I’m never going to take care of the earlier ones.

            Write a first draft.  Perfection will show up in the later ones.  Honest.

            Next time, we’re well into screenwriting contest season, so I thought I’d talk about the stories contest readers hate.

            Until then, go write.