3: How Not to Use Big Words

by Steve Rosse

Here’s the first para of a “novel” about Thailand, chosen at random from some e-book site:

“The heat and pollution on Sukhumvit tried to cut me down to size. I danced along powered by an unlikely lust and ignored the sweat steam. The night young and possibilities endless. Fools pointlessly filled stalls with sex toys and porno DVD’s. Huge Negroid whores muttered obscenities as my glare fleetingly reduced them to nothingness. Ugly katoeys hinted at violence but moved too slowly on six inch high-heels to limit my concrete flow. Even a Thai moto driver allowed me an inch of grace as he hurled his bike into the wastelands of Soi 7.”

Wow.  Somebody’s trying waaaaaay too hard.  Listen, fellow writers, if a reasonably well educated native English speaker like me cannot understand what you’re saying, you’re not saying it right. Too many aspiring authors think that big, obscure, or fancy words make writing important.  Or at least I am assuming that’s the problem, otherwise I can think of no reason on God’s green earth for a sentence like: “Huge Negroid whores muttered obscenities as my glare fleetingly reduced them to nothingness.”

In his apparent desire to sound profound, or artsy, or something, this author has left this reader wondering why lust is unlikely and what sweat steam is. I wonder why the third sentence is incomplete, why it’s pointless to sell porn or sex toys on Sukhumvit, why black prostitutes are “negroid” instead of the equally offensive and outdated “negro,” how a glare (by definition something of lasting duration) is “fleeting,” why “high” and “heels” are hyphenated, what the heck is a “concrete flow,” and what’s a “Thai moto.”

In other words, this “novel” opens with a paragraph that is virtually without sense or meaning, and without the excuse of sonority.  How many readers will bother to slog through the muck of another paragraph before they hurl the e-book at the e-wall?

I love erudition as much as any other reader. I read Shakespeare for pleasure.  But you have to earn the right to challenge your readers, and you earn it by delivering a reading experience that is as elevated as your prose. The problem with the para quoted above is not only that its language is inaccessible, it’s that even if a reader stops and re-reads each sentence, there’s still no payoff.  The plot has not been advanced, no set dressing has been provided, no character developed.  It’s just a bunch of random words.

Compare that novel’s opening para to this one, from “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad:

“The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprit. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.”

See the difference? One author introducing a place and a time with elegant, articulate, intelligent language that sounds like song when read out loud. The other trying to do the same thing but accomplishing only a string of random words.  Random words arranged on a page are called a crossword puzzle, not a novel.

Steve Rosse is a former columnist for The Nation newspaper in Bangkok.  His books are available on Amazon.com