Stephen King's most misused piece of writing advice
- sciart0
- May 19
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "If you’ve spent any time learning the craft of writing, you’ve undoubtedly heard your share of myths, opinions, and prejudices gussied up as hard-and-fast rules. Things like: You should write every day. Only write what you know. Bad grammar is a sign of an unintelligent person. You must know the rules to break them. And never, ever start a sentence with a conjunction.
One such “rule” that has always baffled me is the ban against writing with a thesaurus. I’ve heard it from fellow writers and English professors. I have friends who won’t touch one even to scratch out the occasional email or tweet.
But the incarnation of this bad advice that has made the rounds online more than any other has to be Stephen King’s take:
“[T]hrow your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
In King’s defense, taken in its original context, this sound bite may have been a recommendation to avoid using a thesaurus or other reference books when writing a first draft.
Fair enough; however, the quote has long since traveled afield from that context and is often misused to suggest that there is no room for a thesaurus anywhere in a writer’s toolkit — a misuse King’s unnecessary hyperbole does nothing to dissuade readers from adopting.
And that is nonsense (also bunkum, hooey, hogwash, twaddle, and poppycock). A thesaurus a treasure trove of words cataloged with a librarian’s exactness to help writers compose the best phrase to express their ideas and thoughts.
In fact, the word thesaurus comes from the Greek thēsauros, meaning “a treasury or storehouse.”
But like any treasure, we only derive its full value if we understand how to spend it wisely."