Put Away Your Dictionary || Stephen King || Blog
June 01, 2022
Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. (A suggestion, if you'd question.)
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopaedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket.
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right—and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain—or just spell it phonetically and correct it later.
Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it--but later.
When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
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