Choosing The Right Words

What’s so important about choosing the right words?

Even though you have a dynamite idea for an erotic story, if you accept mediocre word choices more often than not, then your writing will be as lifeless as Bob Dole’s dick when he’s missed his Viagra dose.

Every single word has a denotation – a meaning. When you look up a word in the dictionary, you find its denotation. However, the connotation of a word is what we’re really concerned with here. The connotation of a word is all about the nuances and insinuations of a word. For instance, the difference between a

smile

and a

smirk

is in the connotation. You move your mouth in approximately the same way for both, but you wouldn’t smirk at your newborn baby.

If you want to write well, grab your readers, make it on the Top Twenty List at Literotica, you can’t skimp on your word choice. Take the time to find just the right word. If you do, you’ll be closer to distinguishing yourself from other amateur writers.

So, is it a crime to write, "He walked toward her?"

No, of course not. But why settle? The English language is like a palette of paints. Use it with care, and you can create images that are vivid and alive. Or stick with the basics, and run the risk of ending up with something bland and uninteresting. Take this sentence, for instance:

She looked at his big cock.

There’s nothing wrong with that sentence. But if your entire story consists of third grade vocabulary (not counting the sexual words, like cunt and cock), your writing is going to be flat and boring. Whenever I finish a first draft, I go over the entire thing, looking for words that are, what I call a tad common. In the example I just gave you, the words "looked" and "big" stand out to me as common.

Depending on the tone of your story, you might want to consider substituting these words for more descriptive choices.

She glanced at his enormous cock.

She stared at his monstrous cock.

Also, consider substituting descriptive phrases in the place of words:

She stared hungrily at his cock, which was roughly the size of your average kielbasa.

Uninterested, she glanced at his enormous cock and then shrugged, unimpressed.

Now that’s not to say I don’t ever use the word "big," or "looked." It’s all right to intersperse words like those into your writing. Like in all things, balance is the key. Just be careful you don’t go overboard the other way and have an adjective attached to every single noun and an adverb to every verb.

Completely blocking my view from anything else in the large and spacious room, her ponderous tits swayed invitingly in front of my eager face, and slurping and panting like an oversexed teenager, I licked them ravenously, until they were shiny with my hot saliva.

Personally, I think the above sentence is over the top. There is such a thing as going too far, but just how far you go will depend on your own style.

But I don’t want to sit there for half an hour trying to think of a better word. What do you suggest for those of us whose heads aren’t swimming with synonyms?

No writer should be without a thesaurus. I use mine far more often than I use my dictionary. Sometimes my brain cooperates and gives me the "perfect" word, but sometimes all I know is that the word on the screen is wrong. If I’m feeling lazy, I’ll press *shift F7*, which brings up my computer’s thesaurus. But the choices there are usually limited. The best thesaurus I’ve ever found is "The Synonym Finder," by J.I. Rodale. Because it’s set up alphabetically, it’s easy to use, and it contains over a million synonyms.

Okay, I got a thesaurus. Now what?

Start writing, of course.

Oh, and read, read, read. There’s no substitute for reading other people’s work if you want to improve your writing. But don’t just cruise the Incest category and read a random story. Find something that you like. And don’t judge it solely on its turn-on factor either; instead, see if it strikes you as particularly well-written. Then, divorce yourself from the content and analyze it. Find an author whose work you admire and read it. Believe it or not, the more you expose yourself to good writing, the more you’ll absorb the rules of grammar, the flow of dialogue, the vast differences between the written and the spoken word.

May you write a juicy story!