A Writer’s Vocabulary: Does Size Matter?

Exploring the erotics of words on the page

There are these things writers use to write stories called words.

Some writers know lots of words. Other writers (like me) don’t really know too many.

But what matters most is not how many words you know, but how you use the ones you do know. How you experience them and live them and touch them and breathe them and listen to them and wake up to them. And more.

One of my first lessons as a writer, way back when I was twenty and thought I knew so much about the world but knew so little (the ideal state to begin any big endeavor), came from F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read a quote by him warning that a writer shouldn’t have a large vocabulary because once you know a word, you have to use it.

What an audacious thought — that a writer shouldn’t know a lot of words. But it struck me as true because words can be like a writer’s muscles — as prominent as a body builder’s bursting biceps — and if you’ve got muscles, you’ll flex them. But big muscles aren’t necessarily strong muscles, and the most important muscles to many athletes aren’t the ones that flex in a showy way.

Writers like to think of words with all of the shadings and echoes and tastes…