“foetid” would be better, surely?
lol. You bastard, you’ve gone and ruined Shaw for me. 
A book I almost read recently. I don’t recall the book title but it also contained something like this, identifying the speaker of every sentence they spoke. One of the few books I have abandoned unfinished. Severely irritating.
I actually learned something from one of J. K. Rowling’s. She has her characters “traipse” places when they could walk there. I noticed particularly that she had them traipsing during an unpleasant time. Since I always thought “traipse” was kind of a flippant word, like “skip” (“I traipsed down to the ice cream store with my friends to get a cone”), it put me off until I looked up the word and found it means “walk or move wearily or reluctantly.”
Good to know! She still overuses the word, though.
One thing I noticed is that sunlight never reflects or glints or shimmers off a surface in Stephen King books. It heliographs.
This is an excellent rule. But you don’t need to use “he said” every time a person speaks. In a conversation, you start leaving it out. For instance.
“Hi,” he said.
"Hello, " she said.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
He wondered what to say next. “Nice day.”
“A bit too warm for me.”
Carver gets away with it because readers just ignore speech tags. When it’s read, though, it really sticks out.
Yes. Good catch!
Point taken.
Terry Pratchett is inordinately fond of “susurration”.
Several years ago, I read a book about someone who was considered the first transgendered person to openly live this way, and that word was overused for a bit, although the person was living in a Tibetan monastery at the time.
Ann Rule uses “pellucid” a lot to describe the sky in the Seattle area.
Steve Martini (author of legal thrillers) almost never describes a character’s expression; instead, he just writes that the person “makes a face.” I always imagine the character crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out.
Dean Koonz-crenellated & charnel. There’s others, like susseration, but can’t think of all of them now. I know they sent me to the dictionary the first time, but now they annoy me
Good one. I’m currently re-reading From a Buick 8 and damn if that car doesn’t have a gaping maw.
So far I’ve only read one book by Kate Atkinson (“Life After Life”)and while I do like her style quite a bit, I could do with much less “salubrious”. Also, seeing as the story takes place in England, perhaps “endroit” could be limited to the scenes that take place in Paris. Oh that’s right; there aren’t any.
Doors, orcs’ heads, backpacks full of hobbit food, and the like burst asunder all the time in Tolkien.
Diana Gabaldon’s characters often do things ‘with alacrity’.
Yeah. Too cyclopean.
Can someone go back in time and give this rule to all my writing teachers? It tapered off by senior year of high school, but for a while we would get deductions if we ever used the word “said” when writing dialogue. It made the prose so damn purple it was edging on escaping the visible spectrum.
For my part, I nominate ‘analystic’. I think Donaldson made it up, actually.
I love Keith R.A. DeCandido’s Star Trek books, particularly the I.K.S. Gorkon series.
But it is just plain ODD to hear the word “anyhow” come out of the mouth of a Klingon, much less every Klingon in the book.
And what the hell kinda Klingon ever says, let alone in the heat of battle, “It behooves me to be parsimonious with my [military] intelligence”?
That’s how you end up with unintentional humor such as:
“They’re going to get us!” Spiffins ejaculated.