Oxford University Press publishes a reference book entitled Better Wordpower -- a terrific reference of vocabulary from different professions and disciplines almost guaranteed to make you sound like an expert. This is good enough, but inside you'll also find a synonym / antonym list, common foreign phrases, words that are often confused, a wonderful section discussing basic etymology (really good for aspiring GRE test takers), and a collection of difficult words.
The difficult words are less common, more provocative, than many of the GRE words I had the pleasure of studying a couple of years ago. The GRE words can consider themselves replaced. Oxford's list piques both interest and curiosity. Musical, Updike words.
Try building a sentence around these suckers. It’s not so easy. These words have to be fitted to a paragraph, tailored to a character’s voice or scene, or they’ll sound like you’re trying too hard. Too writerly.
From the Oxford book:
Your assignment is to construct sample sentences. Let's post a few!
If you haven't yet discovered The Paris Review interview archive, you're in for an incredible treat. From the 1950s forward, here they all are, a diamond necklace of discussions with some of the most gifted, most admired, most cantankerous writers of the last 60 years -- novelists, biographers, essayists, poets. Poets all.
"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."--William Styron, Interview, Writers at Work: First Series (1958)
On the Paris Review website, the Styron interview is referenced as having taken place in 1954 (the 1958 reference above indicates a later published collection). Along with Styron, to name a few, there's Graham Greene, Ralph Ellison, Isak Dinesen, Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway seemed particularly disdainful of the interview process, stubbornly chiding George Plimpton for asking "old, tired questions." Hemingway's responses are often understandably, but disappointingly, as clipped as the dialogue in his short stories.
In later years, you'll find John Dos Passos. Maya Angelou. John Cheever. Pablo Neruda. A.S. Byatt. Margaret Atwood. Margaret Drabble. T.C. Boyle. Umberto Eco.
The questions progress from a rather hesitant tone (perhaps they were edited?) to a more directly personal, charged character that some might call intrusive. You'll find more questions about the writing process itself, and writing habits, topics many authors are hesitant to articulate, as Hemingway famously was: do writers consciously consider plot, do the characters really take over the reins (Cheever's response to this is hilarious), how does a writer know when he/she is done, personal questions about the moment they realized they would be a writer and when they told their families, as if wanting to write were a sin requiring confession to one's parents. Journalism students might be interested to note the different interview styles across the decades.
The link below will take you to the 1950s interviews, which are available in full -- just follow the tabs to the others, many of which are excerpted. You're sure to make discoveries here. Most libraries are likely to have some access to these brief moments of literary history through subscriptions or archival records.
So if you're feeling solitary and unloved as a writer, laugh and cry a few tears over these treasures and understand you're not alone.
http://www.theparisreview.org/literature.php/prmDecade/1950
Quote from THE INTERNATIONAL THESAURUS OF QUOTATIONS (compiled by Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall De Bruhl)
When you doubt what's on your own pages, I think it means that what's on the page is not the full truth -- and you know it. When workshop comments make you doubt yourself and your story, push through those doubts. It's the revision equivalent of getting back on the bike, and it will steel you against professional rejection later on when the reasons might be a complete mystery and not worth any lengthy contemplation.You can't write in a vacuum. When you consider the reader, you get to the truth of your story, the emotive truth, giving something through your stories that others can recognize in their own lives, an experience that lives beyond the page. Truth is elusive, and lies beneath heavy layers of language and structure and dialogue and action. Truth requires work.
Because the people on this new task force have to be at least as smart, equipped, technologically savvy, financed, and even motivated as those perpetrating the frauds.
Because the gloves have to come off when a former stock exchange Chairman is the one behind history's largest and longest-running Ponzi scheme.
Because the last thing we need when the next crisis blows is someone standing behind a podium sipping their water and telling us, "Well, we didn't think we had enough information to go in."
One of the surest ways to educate yourself about common writing pitfalls is to read other people's drafts, and then try to find the same infractions in your own work. Whether through workshops or private critique groups, you may find that you're more adept at recognizing structural problems in other people's work than in your own, especially when you begin.
Don't waste time trying to figure out why. I've been guilty of all of the things I'm about to discuss, and probably will be again. Just try your best to apply what you learn.
The writer who cares more about words than about story – characters, action, setting, atmosphere – is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart – and its cargo – from the horse. (John Gardner)
You're reading an interesting scene, a good one. The characters' stakes are high, and you're anxious to see who gets shot. And then you read something like, "But Dorothy wasn't the type of woman to liked having a gun pointed at her; in fact, her blood came to an urgent, trembling boil."
Bang. The gun goes off, but it's the reader's concentration that's shot.
Unless you're writing a spoof, try to avoid interrupting your story's action with an editorial or an internal monologue. It's analogous to a sword-wielding actor suddenly turning to the camera to explain his fencing strategy. When this happens on the page, it's just as obvious and unwanted -- an author intrusion that indicates no trust for the reader's sensibilities, a conviction that the reader must be told what's going on instead of shown. Worse, it indicates a lack of confidence on the writer's part in allowing dialogue or action to convey the same sentiment in a way that advances a deeper understanding of the character, and in a way that will actually interest the reader.
It's hard as a writer to relinquish that control, but these interruptions are easy to recognize once you know to look for them. Try to focus instead on what the character does or what she is feeling -- not what physiologically happens to her. Remember Dwight Swain's concept of scene and sequel. Focus your scene on the action, and the sequel on reflection and character development. Both should advance your story, and not state the obvious. Don't disturb the dream.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. (E.L. Doctorow)
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different. (Neil Gaiman)
The same holds true for describing physical -- or physiological -- actions or reactions. Analyze your writing for scenes in which your characters are "whirling around" or "turning their heads from side to side" or "hopping on one foot" or "dodging first one car and then another." Similarly, too much blood boiling, guts roiling, hearts pounding, sweats breaking, and knees shaking makes your characters sound like marionettes -- cartoonish and unrealistic, even freakish.
What your reader wants to know is what your characters are thinking and feeling and doing. The physiological expression of their emotion is a copout. We know what we feel like when we break a sweat, or the conditions that would make this happen to us. But in that respect it is a cliched human response. It's a stage direction, like waving ones arms in the air or pulling one's hair.
We know what this means in cartoons. These kinds of descriptions come easily to us because there is a common understanding of what they generally mean within the human experience. But they are caricatures. They disrupt the flow of writing, and are used frequently because the writer doesn't know what else to say. This may be an indicator that the writer is not in complete touch with the characters. But what do they mean uniquely for your characters? What is it you're really trying to say? What is most important about the cartoonish action for your readers to understand?
Eliminating these physical descriptions from the page will rejuvenate your writing and give your story's pacing a sense of immediacy. By all means, use these expressions as placeholders if you can't think of anything else in the frenzy of composition. But when you revise, eliminate them with a vengeance.
...a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. (Frank Yerby)
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. (Ernest Hemingway)
I was reading a draft novel written by a friend and I was struck by the sudden reappearance of a character from the protagonist's past. I wrote in the margin, "This better go somewhere."
It didn't. But my friend -- transparently -- wanted the reader to think it would.
Hey, look over there! Something shiny!
Red herrings -- the tactic of introducing a person or activity that goes nowhere relative to your main plot -- is a device that most readers recognize because their built-in shit detectors are better than yours. Its sudden appearance is suspect, and if you later take it away or have it come to a dead end, especially with no explanation, there goes your credibility as a storyteller
Ask yourself if it would be better to suggest -- or actually involve -- another character in a deception. Ask yourself how, from the beginning of your story, you can establish ambiguity or tension in a non-contrived manner. Rather than sudden appearances or re-appearances, can your red herring have a more constant or frequent presence on the page? Can he be suspiciously or conveniently "around" at critical moments? After key actions? Readers will suspect things, even if -- perhaps especially if -- you don't state them.
Try to establish these predicaments with the idea that you want your reader to return to your novel to see if you slipped up, or if they can "spot" the hint that things are not as they were led to suspect by your plotting.
The movie The Sixth Sense provides a good example of this. Remember watching it the second time to see if you could spot the bullet hole in the shirt?
The same holds true for unlikely lapses on the part of a character in an effort to allow certain things to happen. A detective doesn't notice that the light bulb outside his door is out before he's stabbed. As in Michael Clayton, Clayton doesn't notice that a bomber is getting out of his car when he's only several feet away -- no matter how engrossing the phonecall. These are easily resolved -- the detective can sense an unfamiliar darkness a split second before he's hit; Clayton could have been about to turn a corner onto the street where his car was parked, in full view of the accomplice.
These characters are smart, savvy people who are good at their jobs and deserve to be respected. They would notice things like this, and can simultaneously be jumped unawares.
When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip. (Elmore Leonard)
In one draft of a novel I read, each chapter was written from a particular character's point of view. With each subsequent chapter, the writer would restate, in exposition, some of the key actions or points that had been conveyed in the last point-of-view chapter for that same character.
Trust your readers. They will remember. Always move your story forward, not backward. If you think of a better way to say something, go back to the original spot and change it.
This principle can also apply to writing that contains technical information. As with SHAKEDOWN, a balance must be struck between including too much technical information that doesn't matter, and enough such that people with your same subject knowledge or background will find the story's technical machinations believable. If your reader can skip this information without losing anything critical, and if your technically-minded readers believe in its plausibility, then everyone's happy and you've done the job.
All quotes can be found on the following website. Attribution is assumed to be correct.
koti.mbnet.fi/pasenka/quotes/q-writ.htm