When you are a writer, your choice of words is everything. If you are working on a college thesis, feel free to use as many convoluted phrases and intellectually extravagate words as you see fit. However, in the world of fiction you have to consider your audience and their expectations.
I know the words formulaic writing are dirty words, but, they may be your key to getting successfully published. Now, before you start looking for a torch and pitchfork, let's talk about audience expectations.
The first thing to understand about your audience is that it is an audience of one. Much like a writer spends hours alone at the keyboard, your reader may be spending hours alone with your words. Write like you are communicating directly with that one reader. If you think that way while writing, chances are good that your word choices will be more personal and less grandiose.
Know your genre. Please, drop the pretense that your work transcends genre. If it is a fantasy adventure, then embrace your genre and feel free to steal any aspect of any other genre you need to make your book uniquely yours. I repeat, embrace your genre and meet the expectations of your reader. Failure to cover the formulaic basics may mean alienating the core audience you need to make your book a success.
Know your classic themes. While a marvelously twisted exploration of the limits of the readers ability to comprehend your maliciously overly convoluted plot developments can be a lot of fun, keep in mind, nothing beats the simple classic themes.
Good vs Evil
Boy meets Girl
Unrequited Love
Twist of Fate
Jealousy
Destiny
Greed
Obsession
A Quest
Rescue
You get the idea. The real challenge is to see what you can do to enrich the good old-fashioned classic motivations and conflicts. Remember, classical literature has already held up to test of time.
Read the classics, legacy and modern. If you have a killer idea for a book, start looking for other works that are related, the older and better known the better. Read it. Dissect it and figure out what makes it a classic. How has it made it this far? What word choices are being made to make this a classic? What can it teach you about writing your own classic?
Use the words and phrases your genre expects. If you are writing a noir detective story, use the proper wording for the genre. If your hardboiled flatfoot from the seedy side of town has a foppish vocabulary, you have a lot of explaining to do that may be in vain. If you are writing seedy and hard-boiled, then the expectation is that the word choice is hard-boiled and seedy.
If you are not sure whether or not you are hitting your marks, it is time for bribery. You need someone not involved in the writing project to read it out loud to you. It will be painfully apparent if your words are not painting the proper mental image. Take your medicine and make the proper word choices. You will see you chances of getting published increase dramatically.