“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”—Ernest Hemingway.
The thesaurus is bad for your writing. The only acceptable use for the thesaurus for a writer is to recall that word that you know is exactly what you want, but can’t quite remember. Even in these cases, you should only draw on the thesaurus in matters of extreme importance, otherwise if you can’t quite remember the word that means the same thing as “energetic,” for instance, just put down “energetic” and move on. When you read back over your work you’ll find it didn’t really matter anyway; “energetic” plays just fine.
I’m disappointed every time I see a vocabulary post on all the different and better ways to say “happy” or “angry”or “sad.” I understand being excited by language—I feel it myself and encourage it in others—but nothing says happy quite like the word itself, or perhaps better yet, a smile or a laugh or an arm thrown around someone’s shoulders.
Context communicates a great deal. One of the remarkable aspects of writing is that the total effect of a story, a scene, or even a thought, is greater than the collection of words that make it up. Big, ten-dollar words tend to keep me at arm’s length from a story. Sure, I may enjoy the language for its own sake, but I won’t feel close to any of the characters because the language draws too much attention to itself and distracts from the story. Maybe you’ve felt that some.