Issues with vocabulary

Have you guys and girls ever encountered a vocabulary barrier whilst writing? I mean, you want to convey certain details and feelings of a character, and you know which details and feelings they are, but you simply can't find the correct words and instead use generics that you know don't work as well as the words you really want to use?

Well, I have, and it sucks.

I wrote some bits of my novel today and, compared to my previous chapters, it felt like sloppy writing, because I think my vocabulary was kinda weak for this part. Of course, it didn't also help that I felt uninspired and decided to write anyway. But this is seriously annoying me, because I feel I'm running out of words too soon...

Should it be such a big concern or am I worrying too much about it?

(please note that English isn't my first language, so don't judge my vocabulary by this post)

I understand completely. It's definitely not just you. My writing reads kind of... I want to say flowery, but it's not... strange* at times because I'd have no idea what word to stick there and instead just put something that sounds like it'd make sense but actually doesn't.

*See, word choice fail

I think the best way to fix it is to pass it to someone else; show somebody else the passage/sentence and ask the person which word would go there, or describe the meaning you want to convey with that word with the person and see if the person can come up with anything. It works for me, at least...!

I doubt the problem is actually your vocabulary; everyone has instances where there's something they really want to describe, and they can't figure out how to say it. It might just be a temporary mental block, one of those tip-of-the-tongue thing where you know you know what you want to say but just can't think of it at the moment, or it might be a case of you not really having a handle on what it is you're trying to describe. Neither of these issues has to do with vocabulary; storing up a bunch of clunkers like "lapideous" isn't going to help you out in a pinch.

If you're reasonably well-read, you almost certainly have the vocabulary to produce great writing. Don't worry about it.

What bothers me much more: I'll notice myself using a certain word a lot, but nothing else fits the same.

Crazy Linoone said:

I understand completely. It's definitely not just you. My writing reads kind of... I want to say flowery, but it's not... strange* at times because I'd have no idea what word to stick there and instead just put something that sounds like it'd make sense but actually doesn't.

*See, word choice fail

I think the best way to fix it is to pass it to someone else; show somebody else the passage/sentence and ask the person which word would go there, or describe the meaning you want to convey with that word with the person and see if the person can come up with anything. It works for me, at least...!

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It's a good idea... A few words don't mean the person is writing the story for me (which is something I fear... a lot).

Writing in a flowery style isn't that bad, in fact I'd prefer doing things this way than the rather straightforward manner I write my stuff.

Negrek said:

I doubt the problem is actually your vocabulary; everyone has instances where there's something they really want to describe, and they can't figure out how to say it. It might just be a temporary mental block, one of those tip-of-the-tongue thing where you know you know what you want to say but just can't think of it at the moment, or it might be a case of you not really having a handle on what it is you're trying to describe. Neither of these issues has to do with vocabulary; storing up a bunch of clunkers like "lapideous" isn't going to help you out in a pinch.

If you're reasonably well-read, you almost certainly have the vocabulary to produce great writing. Don't worry about it.

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I'm well-read, but what bothers me is that I don't have the memory of the words I've read. Maybe I think I don't but I actually do, just subconsciously? It's been a while since I've read works with more elaborated language, though.

Meursault said:

What bothers me much more: I'll notice myself using a certain word a lot, but nothing else fits the same.

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Haha this happens to me as well. My main character is a little girl, and I sometimes need to refer to her 3 or more times in the same paragraph, and I have to alternate between her name and a couple of words that mean "girl" in my language, which sometimes proves to be a challenging exercise. ^^

Cerberus said:

Haha this happens to me as well. My main character is a little girl, and I sometimes need to refer to her 3 or more times in the same paragraph, and I have to alternate between her name and a couple of words that mean "girl" in my language, which sometimes proves to be a challenging exercise. ^^

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One commonly used way to circumvent this is to refer to the person by one of her traits in a way that the reader would be able to identify the character.

For example, the character you are talking about is a purple-eyed, redheaded lady knight. Instead of referring to her as "Alanna" or "The woman," you may refer to her as "the woman with purple eyes" "the lady knight" ect.

Cerberus said:

Haha this happens to me as well. My main character is a little girl, and I sometimes need to refer to her 3 or more times in the same paragraph, and I have to alternate between her name and a couple of words that mean "girl" in my language, which sometimes proves to be a challenging exercise. ^^

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I have this problem ALL OF THE TIME. 'Tis so frustrating >.<

Legendaryseeker99 said:

One commonly used way to circumvent this is to refer to the person by one of her traits in a way that the reader would be able to identify the character.

For example, the character you are talking about is a purple-eyed, redheaded lady knight. Instead of referring to her as "Alanna" or "The woman," you may refer to her as "the woman with purple eyes" "the lady knight" ect.

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I try to do that, but when my paragraphs stretch out to 12 to 15 sentences and the majority of the sentences are about the character doing something, I find myself using he, his, she, her, or the character's name waaay too much. I've tried this but it..just sounds weird sometimes. I'm not entirely sure how to incorporate it smoothly into my stories xD..

Legendaryseeker99 said:

One commonly used way to circumvent this is to refer to the person by one of her traits in a way that the reader would be able to identify the character.

For example, the character you are talking about is a purple-eyed, redheaded lady knight. Instead of referring to her as "Alanna" or "The woman," you may refer to her as "the woman with purple eyes" "the lady knight" ect.

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This is terrible. Don't do it.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using the character's name or a pronoun over and over. They are invisible words; they're just there to move things along, which is what you want unless you actually need to be dwelling on the character's eyes or hair color at that point.

I definitely have issues finding the right word sometimes. I can easily get all hung up on finding the right word or phrase to describe sometime, but when I let myself do this, I lose the flow of the writing and/or motivation.

So instead, if I know I'm not satisfied with a word or phrase, I'll write or type it in brackets and move on. Then when I come back to revise, I know I wasn't happy with that phrase, and I can change it. Sometimes even when I go back, the words that first came to mind that I didn't like actually fit well.

For humans I usually end up alternating between their name and their correct pronoun, which usually works fine. In reffings, however, I alternate between the pokemon's nickname, their species, their pronoun, and sometimes what they are based off of (ex. Poochyena as "the hyena pup".

What I find also sometimes works for word choice is just looking it up in a thesaurus or something.

I just realized I have a problem with overusing 'suddenly' whenever something...err...suddenly happens. >.> Not entirely sure how to fix this, suddenly works best most times but I use it TOO MUCH. -.-

Popcorn the Plot Bunny said:

I just realized I have a problem with overusing 'suddenly' whenever something...err...suddenly happens. >.> Not entirely sure how to fix this, suddenly works best most times but I use it TOO MUCH. -.-

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Have fewer sudden things happen.

I've been having the same problem writing my pokemorph story. What i want to do is run it by my friend slowbro who i talk to on this website a lot, but even though he was the inspiration for one of the characters, he doesn't know what's going to happen, so i can't without spoiling the ending of the first half. i'm totally trapazoided.

"trapazoided" is now my word of the day.

I hate when I'm writing I basically do that. Have a word of the day. For some reason while I'm writing for an extended period of time the same damn word seems to pop up, and I usually don't notice it until I reread like a week later.

Back when I used to write and RP regularly, I had this happen to me a lot. When it comes to characters, I'll mention something about them, as Legendaryseeker said, but there's just sometimes where a feeling doesn't come across with simple words. But once I was challenged to write something, and decided to make it a harder challenge and portray a single feeling throughout the whole story, and I don't think I ever mentioned the name of the feeling maybe once or twice. (It was fairly short, about a page and a half.)

I wouldn't suggest trying that in the middle of a paragraph, but if someone is feeling something strongly, and if it's possible to stick into the story in a paragraph of itself, then maybe try that.

Otherwise, it's been over a year since I really wrote anything worthy of mentioning, so I don't know what to tell you.

Well, I assume there's no particular problem with this thread getting bumped, so.

Cloudsong said:

I just realized I have a problem with overusing 'suddenly' whenever something...err...suddenly happens. >.> Not entirely sure how to fix this, suddenly works best most times but I use it TOO MUCH. -.-

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I run into that frequently as well. And most if not all of the writing I do these days is ASB reffing, which means, specially in contests...

opaltiger said:

Have fewer sudden things happen.

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... That this isn't an option, since I can't quite control it if somebody figured they'd have three actions of shocking swerves all over the place.

I'm not sure whether people even notice when somebody does this, mind, otherwise, it can get rather problematic.

Also, as for the word repetition matter: many of the problems writers I see have are related to what got hammered into their heads when they were starting out. This is one such problem -- fellers get told word repetition is bad. Repeatedly so, as a matter of fact. But what they don't get told is that it's not a problem if you're reusing words that nobody actually notices; I don't think anybody has ever suddenly broken out in the middle of text to think, damn, that writer keeps saying "the" all over the place.

Like Negrek said, nobody really gets bothered by it if you just alternate the name of the character and the respective pronoun.

I pretty much taught myself to be a writer. And, as such, figured out that repeating key words is quite noticeable, whether you're writing or reading something. Pronouns like "her, he, him, et cetera" and handles (not the right word, go figure XD ) like "the, a, et cetera" are fairly unnoticeable. Unless, dealing with the former, you're talking about two beings of the same gender, then using "he" or "her" multiple times in the same sentence referring to both can get confusing.

As for "suddenly", maybe try "unexpectedly", "quickly", or synonyms to those. They may not have the same exact meaning, but they can portray the same ideas.