Another short story in the making

I’m working on another short story (fiction), and using my handy thesaurus liberally.  I love my thesaurus.  It offers me an opportunity to learn words, give precise meanings, and color my worlds with words that people don’t hear every day.  I like it when I read a story and I have to look up a word or two.  That makes me happy, because I’m not only getting a richer view of somthing in the story, but I’m also learning something new.  I think that’s good writing.  Make your readers really see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and feel your story!  Make it such that they need a dictionary handy to nail down what you’re asking them to comprehend here and there.  I love that kind of writing!  Editors say that you should write at an eighth grade level for the general public, but that gets boring in a hurry and you end up repeating words more often than you’d like to in your work.  I do, at least.  I get a good hold on my favorite thesaurus, though, and eighth grade reading goes out the window with redundant terminology and presents new and exciting possibilities with every other word I want to use!  I like that much more than plodding along wondering if my readers will understand what I’m trying to say and dumbing down my writing for no good reason.  I really resent having to dumb down my writing when I could create such depth for my readers otherwise!  So maybe I’ll never get published.  Big deal.  I refuse to dumb down my writing to the point that my writing loses what makes it a story, what makes it original, what makes it colorful, and what makes it a living thing.  I just refuse to do it.  I want to learn something new when I’m writing my own stories, and I make the assumption that people who read my  stories want the same.  I think it would be nice for my readers to be able to walk into work or the soup kitchen or the classroom or up to the crag with a new word to use in conversation and spread the knowledge!  That would be fantastic!  That’s how education works.  We share it.  We learn from each other.  The best part about it is that it costs nothing more than a social interaction with someone who’s learned something new somehow, whether that be through reading, through research, through observation, or through some other means.  I’d like to be the means by which others get somewhat more educated.