I N K

Just a useless adult tryna pen

[squidwrites-blog]

C H A R A C T E R  A E S T H E T I C : F L A X  2/? ( x )

Well I'm still afraid Like a kid in the sixties Staring at the sky Waiting for the bomb to fall. And it's all a lie What they say about stability. It scares me sometimes The emptiness I see in my eyes.

And all the kids names I've ever liked recited tragedy. 

But I was kinda hoping you'd say.

[squidwrites-blog]

C H A R A C T E R  A E S T H E T I C : F L A X  1/? ( x )

Oh with the same teeth with the same teeth Oh with the same teeth I smile, I bite you

With the same hands With the same hands Oh with the same hands, that feed I stab you

Oh just like I Oh just like I Oh just like I love, I kill, I kill

[to-write-my-book-deactivated201]

Speculation on How Vocabulary Choice Effects a the Story’s Tone:

inkworst,

When writing, at first stuffing as many big words into your story feels like it will make you sound smarter, surely making your story better, but that’s not often how it works. Sure, you can prove that you were in Honors/AP writing classes, that you read the dictionary in your off time, that you really studied for the SAT, but besides cramming your smartness- credentials into a book that you might not even feature as a character in, what does that do for your story?

For most people- it might turn them off. There’s only so many times you can stop to look up words before you put the book down permanently. You might alienate your crowd because they don’t care how many big, fancy words you can squash in a sentence, and they start skipping over them. It also detracts from your story. There aren’t too many occasions that over-using your thesaurus works to your story’s advantage. If you write about young children, unless they are all prodigies, and the book isn’t about behavioral science, what are these words they probably don’t know doing there? On the flip side, if you use only the 200 most common words, your story lacks tone and the details don’t do your imagination justice. “Tall” kinda falls around 10-20 feet for me, “ginormous” could be 200 feet. If you don’t put the effort into finding big words when writing about genius students at some fancy school, they don’t come off as geniuses.

Of course, the academic street cred of your vocab isn’t all that affects your story. You create the attitude of your characters, even your narrator has a personality when you give them the right words, you paint a clearer picture of your story’s time period. “Thee’s” and “thou’s” make me wonder if it’s more medieval there, especially if it uses ‘Methinks’, ‘Whilst’, 'Whence’, etc. Olde-timey words from the land of an abundance of e’s. Perhaps the whole paragraphs isn’t filled with old English words, (which would probably make it hard to get through by itself) but sprinkling them throughout can add to the atmosphere of the piece. Likewise, using lingo from a specific time period can help similarly, if you decide something is either the bee’s knees or totally groovy. Alternatively, if it’s just one character doing that, well, I have a bunch of things to wonder about that character now, ex: are they just weird or did they time travel? Bottom line is: either way, word choice affects the story.

Touching upon the vocab of your characters- which is a good thing to diversify, it is important not to forget the narrator is a character as well, even if they are never named or have no face. The narrator can state opinions about the characters and events, approving or disapproving, adding in anecdotes. Perhaps your narrator doesn’t care for the “thee’s” your protagonists constantly drop, because the narrator is from a later time period, and speaks more casually as they tell the story. If your narrator drops in ten dollar words every so often, or even snubs the reader by saying “oh, by the way, that means ”—-“ in case you didn’t know,” they come off even more pretentious and haughty, which adds character to your book and can influence the way the reader interprets the story and how they react to the other characters.

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Hopefully it’s obvious to you that the use of words needs to be thought out and researched so that they are used appropriately and correctly. You can’t just throw in a subculture’s jargon and hope something sticks, you actually have to make people sound like people. If you aren’t careful, how you choose to use vocabulary can sometimes say more about you than it says about your stories and characters.

- inkworst

[poetrylesbian]

Writing Tip

Okay I know there are a million posts going around with alternate words to use in your writing to replace common ones, or like “interesting” words, but here’s my advice:

Do NOT use words unless you are perfectly comfortable with them. Do not feel pressured into making your vocabulary seem big. Some of the best writing I have ever encountered wasn’t full of these fancy and uncommon words. They used natural, genuine language.

Of course I always recommend extending your vocabulary, but don’t force it. My advice is to just read a lot, read all different genres, and your vocab WILL expand, but more naturally, and that will definitely translate better in your writing than choosing words off a list.

[cataesthete-blog]

R.

[aesthetic-moony]

Androgyny is the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics. Gender ambiguity may be found in fashion, gender identity, sexual identity, or sexual lifestyle

(Request)

[yorli]

Enemies of the heir…beware