Coffee, booze, undressing, deprivation: How writers get in the mood to write

English has, or has taken from other languages, so many interesting words.

The problem in trying to use them is most people, the typical "average" person who successfully graduated high school, only has a working vocabulary of around twenty thousand words. Often under 20K. Studies of newspapers show they tend to have the same size working vocabulary; around 20K, and it's easy to conclude there's a reason they don't use more of the dictionary. Even "prestigious upper class" papers like the Wall Street Journal.

Most well read elderly people will often more than double that count as they reach their sixties, as a lifetime of reading accumulates words in their heads. But it takes them decades to gather that expanded vocabulary whereas most kids have shot past 10K words about the time they've reached first grade.

So while it's fun to explore ways to use language, and poetry is arguably almost entirely based on this premise, the result of deep exploration and using your findings just results in readers not following your work. Not even reading it. They'll put it down in the first couple of pages, if they even get that far, when they find themselves wondering what the words mean.

Epistolary isn't exactly a common lexicon word. And most people, for some reason (don't ask me why because I will never understand it), despite having a damned mobile information device in their hands most of the day, won't look things up. Instead, they skip and skim and wonder, and if they do that a lot, they move on to another source or post or article or whatever. One that doesn't insist on using words they don't know.

Chatoyant, onomatopoeia, tacenda, mellifluous, sibilant, absquatulate, sangfroid and more ... they all suffer from lethologica when you try to use them. They leave the audience scratching their heads as they refuse to look it up. It's such a shame.

I'm not as well read as I'd like to be, but I do read, and I usually find myself lit up with eudaemonia after I've come across an unknown word and looked it up. It's so fascinating how you could pull together a phrase to express what you want to say, such as "a friendship of letters" or instead use a word that's been coined to express that very sentiment more concisely.

But even then, I don't want to read something where I'm looking words up every sentence. Or even every paragraph. There's a limit. I guess most folks' is just much lower than that of a more erudite reader.

Which leads to stuff like: "epistolary friendship of letters back and forth." That's a (presumably) professional periodicals writer trying to be read, but unable to resist tossing a bit of expansion into her writing.

PS: my favorite example from this topic, that of how writers approach writing. Hunter S Thompson's Daily Routine.

writing that's unafraid to be confusing.

But "epistolary friendship" isn't confusing at all; it's concise and means exactly what it says on the tin :)

ETA: I haven't read Fury, but if anyone in here hasn't read The Satanic Verses, you're missing out. There's an excellent audiobook read by the magnificent John Lee, too.