Yesterday I read a story that made me want to run to the dictionary several times. I didn't but the strange, long words kept pulling me out of the story.
Granted, the pretentious words were only in the hero's dialogue so that was obviously done on purpose as part of his characterization.
Still, there were so many pretentious words I didn't like him and wondered why the heroine would be interested in such a snooty, boring man.
Yet, I love good dialogue. I love to spice it up with different speech patterns and words for each character.
When I began writing, however, I went overboard with dialogue myself. Too many strange words or saying is worse than too little. If the reader has to go to the dictionary chances are they won't come back. The chances increase each time they must do so. If I'd been reading a novel instead of a very short story, I wouldn't have finished. As it was I was tempted not to.
We walk a tight line writing. We want our dialogue (and everything else) to sing in harmony.
Be mindful of too many pretentious words (or silly words or dialect).
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5 comments:
I agree. If I'm using the dictionary too many times, I'll chuck the book at the wall and forget about it.
In that 1000 word story there were at least 10 really really strange words.
I have many poet friends and many times they stick in words that I have no clue what they are...they're pretty and they sound nice when they're reading......but sometimes they make me feel kinda stupid!! I'm all for beautiful writing in longer works....but there's a line. I don;t want m y reader to have to stop...I want them so engaged in the book that they don't want to put it down even for a second.
I was editing one of my pieces and wanted a new word for ivory. It just sounded too blah...so i pull up dictionary.com and did a thesaurus search. One of the words was nacreous. It looked pretty and sounded pretty....I said it aloud and hubby said "Why would you use a word like that?" Nuff said.....
I read a story the other day, which had at least 3 'high dollar college words', as my spouse would say. Fortunately, it was easy to figure out their meanings, from they context in which they were used. But yeah, it was slightly distracting at first.
You know something else that bothers me about writers... when they pick a name for one of their characters and I don't know how to pronounce it. Like Gillian. Is it pronounced like Gilligan from the island, or Jillian. :) That little detail will bug me from start to finish of a book.
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