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When Writing Gets Tough, Remember This
Take a moment to look at the reality — because it’s joyous
Writing and all forms of art are interesting conundrums. To a large extent, they are infinite. That’s amazing but it’s also overwhelming.
When writing is your job, your hobby, the reason you get out of bed in the morning, it can be frightening. It’s a skill that requires forming original and engaging sentences out of a limited number of words.
Britain’s favourite lexicographer Susie Dent is quoted as saying that the average British person has an active vocabulary of around 20,000 words. That is, the vocabulary that they actually use.
The average person knows about 40,000 words but of course we know plenty of words that we never use.
Writers might have even larger vocabularies as they tend to read widely and actively strive to find and learn words that best convey what they want to say. But that doesn’t mean they use them.
Why?
Because writers aren’t writing for lexicographers. They’re writing mostly for the average reader. Overwhelming readers with fancy, unnecessarily complex words is an error we stop making after we hang up our morterboards (there’s a word I don’t use very often).
