![]() I recognize now that the thrill of all this wasn’t just the words. The few who humored me and soldiered through reacted with a perfunctory “Hm, interesting.” After playing this game enough times, I realized an overly pedantic vocabulary pushed readers away rather than pulled them in. Whenever I shared my early work, the reader would either stop every few lines to ask for a word’s definition, or more commonly, skim the page. At the pinnacle of my word-chasing career, I sometimes even looked beyond the dictionary-a particularly destructive habit-Googled “adjectival form of XXXX” or “What is the adjective for XXXX?” and then combed through a dozen results that led me into some Wiki-like hole from which I’d emerge a half-hour later wondering what I was looking for in the first place. (And my computer and phone already bombard me with enough distractions.) At its worst, what I’ve come to call word-chasing is self-indulgent web browsing. ![]() It’s horrible for concentration, flow, and any semblance of efficiency. Searching for a single word in the dictionary every 15 minutes is no way to write. “Aha! ‘Vitreous.’ Now I can say he has ‘vitreous eyes,’ or even better, that he ‘stares vitreously.’ Yes, yes. “Hmm, how do I say that this thing looks like glass, without saying ‘looks like glass?’ ” Go to dictionary website, search “glass,” scroll scroll scroll. My writing process used to look something like this: Type, type, type. Instead of improving my writing, however, my search for obscure words became a huge time suck, and one that I later realized was also inhibiting my growth as a writer. Salmon Migration Videos Are a Cold Splash of Water for Your Pandemic Ennui Lose Yourself in the Wistful World of Lost-and-Found Camera Forums Would the Perfect Chanel Handbag Change My Life?
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