On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary. In this case, you can happily pack what you have without the slightest bit of guilt and inferiority. As the whore said to the bashful sailor, “It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it.” Some writers have enormous vocabularies; these are folks who’d know if there really is such a thing as an insalubrious dithyramb or a cozening raconteur, people who haven’t missed a multiple-choice answer in Wilfred Funk’s It Pays to Increase Your Word Power in oh, thirty years or so. For example: The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing’s form of organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation. —H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness Like it? Here’s another: In some [of the cups] there was no evidence whatever that anything had been planted; in others, wilted brown stalks gave testimony to some inscrutable depredation. —T. Coraghessan Boyle, Budding Prospects And yet a third—this is a good one, you’ll like it: Someone snatched the old woman’s blindfold from her and she and the juggler were clouted away and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some ...