The Dictionary Trap

Ever had to dig yourself out of the Dictionary Trap? Top writing coaches want to to vary your vocabulary, to widen your word choice. But my editing is often about simplifying my prose. If the reader has to reach for a dictionary, that’s probably a fail.

The Pane of Writing

Do you prefer prose as a transparent window that frames the world, or prose that is as much the art as the content? Do you want to see through the prose for the story, or stand back and admire the craft that went into the prose?

How much patience have you for the author who indulges in lots of uncommon words?

While it’s true and extensive vocabulary can add variety, depth and color to a text, it can also cause confusion and frustration in the reader. And there’s the impact on the readability of the text, the reading age and the appeal to the wider audience. Literary fiction can indulge in rare and obscure words in a way that genre fiction cannot. Literature readers expect it. Genre readers generally want an easier time.

Every time the reader hits an unfamiliar word, they come to a screeching halt, completely taken out of the story. That’s a fail.

Do you explain it? Do you make the reader go look it up? And how many readers sit there with a dictionary beside them?

Word choices matter.

Let’s say the princess adjusts her wimple. What’s a wimple? How do we explain or describe it in a way that doesn’t scream “info-dump” or bring the story to a halt.

If the word is a mere passing detail? The reader shrugs and moves on. If it’s repeated, central to a character or a plot? Now the reader needs an explanation. That’s a diversion from the path of the story, a break in the narrative. However fascinating or entertaining, we take our eye off the progress of the narrative.

How do you explain the appearance and significance of the wimple over other types of head covering without dropping a lecture on historical headgear? There’s plenty to consider: shape, height, material, high-class, low-class, social signifiers, the list goes on.

Perhaps the dictionary definition isn’t specific enough and you decide to include your own extensive notes? And if you let the research get the better of you, you want to include all of it so none of it is wasted.

Here’s another: cockscomb. Medieval and Renaissance scholars can picture it. The rest of us? No idea. Explain that it’s a jester’s hat, complete with cap and bells, now maybe ten per cent of readers get it. But everyone else? That’s the Dictionary Trap.

Specialist terms

Genre writers must walk the line when it comes to word choices. Most obviously the Action genre contains specifics of weapons, planes, cars, explosives. Historical fiction relies on details of clothing, etiquette, and manners to world-build the appropriate period.

Currently the sciences of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence fill thousands of pages of action, thriller, mystery and crime novels.

What’s unique about all these topics? Specialist language. Proper names for proper nouns, things that may or may not exist in the real world. Perhaps you mix some real terms like mercury switch with others that don’t like Heisenberg Compensators (that’s a sci-fi in-joke – who knows that one?). If you don’t explain each one, you leave the reader in your dust and in the dark. Maybe you can throw in some techno-babble or some plausible-sounding academia and get away with it? Maybe not.

Commonly Uncommon

What about some venerable and long-established words? I might use these in my fantasy and hope for the best:

• armoire – a wardrobe. Nothing to do with armour.
• pauldron – shoulder plate. Nothing to do with poultry
• cuirass – chest plate. A French word that has nothing to do with donkeys.

Without qualification, I fall into the Dictionary Trap.

How about:

• petrichor – a paste used for embalming bodies
• nidifugous – a parasitic fungus that grows on orchids.

I completely made those up.

Petrichor is the smell of ground after rain; nidifugous is the instinctive behaviour of hatchlings leaving the nest shortly after hatching. What are the chances any of my audience knows those words?

All Made Up

Here’s a painful truth; every word I make up in my fantasy world, I have to explain. The dictionary trap doesn’t cover those; no dictionary does. But the reader could waste a lot of time and effort chasing non-existent words that only exist in one specific novel.

Maybe I get a pass for the fantasy genre; it’s part of the lore, the world-building. Until I overdo it and generate whole paragraphs where the vocabulary renders the text meaningless.

The Red Ajah was reluctant to report the extent of the Trolloc incursion to the Amyrlin Seat, news no gleeman might make palatable to the highest of the Aes Sidai.

Those are all from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

All-inclusive

In order to reach the widest audience, I have two considerations:

• Whats the target reading level? What range of complex, specialist and uncommon words can I expect my reader to understand with their age and educational level?
• How much can I invent and spin through the book without losing the reader? If I need to include a glossary in the back of the book, I’ve probably gone too far down my personal rabbit hole. That’s a fail.

The answers to both of these are subjective. Make too many assumptions about the reader’s knowledge, patience and dedication to the story, and I’ve fallen into the Dictionary Trap. Fall too many times and that’s a DNF.

That’s ‘Did Not Finish,’ before you look it up.