“Build Your Word Hoard Practice: Collect from Conversation Go to a place where you can overhear people talk without calling attention to yourself—a café, perhaps, or a park, or a sporting event. Now turn your attention to one person’s voice and listen, not to the content of what she is saying, but to the words being used. Just pay attention to those words and notice them. Which ones grab your attention? Now take this practice one step further and collect some of the words that appeal to you by jotting them down in your notebook. When you’ve collected a number of words, see if you can make some sentences with them. If these are not words you would ordinarily use, perhaps they could be coming from a character you invent. Play with these words and see what you can discover. Build Your Word Hoard Practice: Collect from Reading When you read something you like, take time to read it again, not for content, but for language. Let your word mind engage with this piece; listen to it with your writer’s ear. Write down in your notebook all the words that appeal to you. Read through your collected words, marking the ones that stand out for you right now. Look up the meanings of these marked words in a dictionary, if you need to, and then use some of them to compose sentences.”