[TfTi] No Thesaurus? NO WAY, Stephen King!

It’s not often that I disagree with Stephen King about the “rules” of writing. But his claim about this one is so inexpedient that it can’t go unanswered.

Yes, I used my Roget’s to find inexpedient. I was unhappy with words like wrong, incorrect, false. And then I double-checked the dictionary to confirm that it was just the word I wanted to carry the precise meaning and nuance intended:

            in∙expedient adj 1: not expedient : not likely to achieve a purpose or bring success :
            inadvisable, unprofitable

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (Merriam, 1976).

While he wrote it nearly 40 years ago, I had never seen or heard of it until the Big Think newsletter hit my inbox this week, with the headline, “Stephen King’s most misused piece of writing advice.” The author of that article gave the rule a harsher review, calling it “nonsense (also bunkum, hooey, hogwash, twaddle, and poppycock).”

What rule?

To be fair, the context in which King wrote his advice and labeled it a rule with no exceptions gives it some validity. As advice, not as a rule.

One source attributes it to an article King wrote for The Writer magazine in 1986. In a section called (the all caps are used in the version I found online and seem consistent with his dogmatic tone in the article), “EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING SUCCESSFULLY” he lays out this advice for first drafts:

“5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right – and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain – or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.”

The two bold-faced sentences have been taken out of context and quoted as gospel untold times. Sometimes the earlier sentence about throwing your thesaurus in the wastebasket accompanies the “rule.” I’ve not been able to find any retraction or explanation from King that he only meant this to urge writers not to edit themselves during the first draft. I’d be fine with it, if that’s all he meant.

But when I read it for the first time this week, a TV commercial for reruns of All in the Family jumped into my mind, where Archie Bunker says to Mike in his typically loudmouth way, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard!”

Of course, there is no such rule. Certainly not a rule with no exceptions. Not even during first drafts.

Sure, it’s usually a good idea to plug in a word that’s not quite right and keep writing. You can come back and fix it, find just the right word, later.

But sometimes you can’t even think of a decent placeholder word. You’d have to write two or three extra sentences to describe what you’re after. At least that happens to me, often enough that I keep my thesaurus on my desk within arm’s reach.

Other times you have words you could plug in, but you also know there’s a better word that’s right there, below conscious level, trying to surface. And if you move on, it feels like that word may drift away forever.

That’s where the thesaurus — in its meaning from the Greek as “a treasury of words” — shines as a writer’s tool. A minute or two in its pages and that word my brain was trying to surface often pops right out.

Another King “rule” to ignore

I spent some time revisiting King’s mostly wonderful book, On Writing, and in the section called “Toolbox” found another bit of advice that he states as a rule: “use the first word that comes to your mind.” He does qualify that with, “if it is appropriate and colorful.”

Well, of course. “Appropriate” gives us enough wiggle room to eliminate that “first word” advice altogether. And “colorful” gives us permission to go hunting for a better word whether in our mind or an extension of our mind, the thesaurus.

I just don’t follow the logic of King’s attempt to justify this one:

“If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word — of course you will, there’s always another word — but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.”

Um, really? Even if that’s been King’s actual experience, it doesn’t seem universal and it’s not been mine.

Look back at my opening example of using the thesaurus to find the right word in my sentence, But his claim about this one is so inexpedient that it can’t go unanswered.

Not only did inexpedient better express what I really mean, it served another purpose that’s important to me, the rhythm of the sentence. Other than the two longer words, almost all have one syllable. To my ear, using “inexpedient” instead of “wrong” causes the reader to slow down slightly at that spot and take in my meaning more thoughtfully. That it might be a less familiar word, though not arcane enough to lose most readers entirely, I believe, adds to this effect. I like how the “in” and “un” prefixes play off each other, too.

And King himself knows better than his first-word “rule” would argue. At the back of On Writing, he provides an example of first draft writing and second draft editing. The first draft carries the title that was the first thing that came to mind, The Hotel Story. Because the story is about a writer who wants to stay in Room 1408 to experience the legends connected to that room, the title becomes 1408 in the second draft.

A better example comes where the hotel manager character changes his demeanor from “disconsolate” in the lobby of the hotel to “in charge” in his own space. King’s first draft had another character, on observing this changed demeanor, attribute it to the changed location.

In the first draft: Yes, it was the room, Mike reckoned.

In the second draft, King found a better word: Yes, it was the office, Mike reckoned.

He doesn’t explain that change, apparently lumping it in with the statement, “The reasons for the majority of changes are self-evident …” My take is King decided, after hesitating and cogitating, that “office” better connected with the man’s change to feeling “in charge” than simply calling it his “room.”

I agree. I doubt he needed a thesaurus to come up with office — though it’s possible that even he has those occasional moments when a word we know quite well refuses to appear when called for. But if he had consulted one, he might have toyed with calling that room the hotel manager’s “chambers” to give it a bit more power over the man’s mood and mien.

Your vocabulary tool

Back to King’s Toolbox advice, he tells us that the writer’s “commonest of all” tools is vocabulary. He advises not to worry about the size of your vocabulary and to let it grow naturally through reading.

For me, that includes reading entries I find in my thesaurus and dictionary when I’m writing and looking for just the right word. Reading and writing don’t always have to be segregated in time.

Those just-right words are often ones I know — or knew — and have lost track of in the moment. But sometimes scanning the list of synonyms leads to words I don’t know. If I have an inkling of their precise meaning (their general meaning should be close to all the others in the list) or if I just like the way they sound or would affect the rhythm of the sentence, I turn to the dictionary to make sure of the meaning.

The point here is that nobody’s vocabulary includes the full range of beauty available in any language.

Rosetta Stone notes that Merriam-Webster includes over 470,000 words in its unabridged English dictionary, while the OED has over 600,000. And other estimates range to over a million words. The BBC, however, cited the OED as estimating that there were 171,146 words “currently in use in the English language” as of 2018.

The Rosetta Stone article notes that we are adding more than 5,000 new words per year to these numbers. And of course, some words fall out of use over time, as well. The upshot is that we don’t really know how many words we could be using, but it’s a lot!

Estimates of how many of those words a person commands in their personal vocabulary also vary. In part, the variations flow from using different assumptions and terminology. One study in 2016, for example, found that the average educated adult in their 20s knew 42,000 lemmas (defined as an “uninflected word from which all inflected words are derived”) and that as they aged the same group learns about 6,000 more lemmas, reaching a vocabulary of 48,000 lemmas by age 60. [Aside: I read several definitions of lemma and still don’t fully understand how it differs from “word” or why these scientists prefer it.]

Another study the same year, used the term words and found that a similar age range of participants starting at “university” age knew approximately 15,000 words and vocabularies grew to more than 19,000 words in the 60+ age group. The authors noted that these numbers closely track several other recent studies.

Regardless of which study you choose, this means that an educated adult will know less than 10% of all the words in our rich and vibrant English language.

Why on earth would writers want to limit themselves to such a meager sampling of the possibilities? Especially when we have such a handy tool available to find more than we can store in our brains?

Keep your thesaurus in a place of honor, not the wastebasket, because as another luminary taught us:

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

— Mark Twain

Proper tool handling

Like any tool, it’s pretty easy to mess things up. I’ve been using hammers since childhood, worked summers through college building above ground redwood swimming pools, and still enjoy home renovation projects.

And I still bend nails now and then. In fact, I pride myself on how good I’ve become at straightening out the bent ones with the claw part of the hammer and managing to complete driving the restored nail in. That skill takes a lot of practice. It also means getting good at judging when the nail is beyond saving, i.e., when not to use the tool that way. And when not to use it at all, because the job calls for a screw.

Knowing when and how to use your thesaurus is vital, if you are to avoid what’s really behind King’s abhorrence of it: the temptation to use a fancy word, when a simple one would do the job as well. Or, to substitute a synonym for the sake of what some critics call “elegant variation” when repetition provides clarity and a pleasing cadence.

With those reasons not to out of the way, here are some reasons for using a thesaurus that can make your writing better and the task easier (with some repetition for emphasis):

• When you know there’s a better word than the one you just typed or thought of, but can’t recall it right now
• When the word you’ve used doesn’t quite carry the exact meaning you intend, but you have no idea what word would do the job better
• When you realize you’re using an adverb to try to get a verb to say what you mean, for example, you wrote “ran quickly” and the thesaurus entry for “ran” enables you to replace both words with a stronger verb, such as “sprinted” or “dashed”
• When you know that repeating the same word is awkward and serves no useful purpose
• When you want to find a shorter or longer word that will improve the pacing and rhythm

Are you a fan of the thesaurus?

I used mine at least a half dozen times while writing this post.

What other situations do you think make a thesaurus the right tool for the writer’s job?