: I think Secespitus hits the nail on the head by saying: People will rarely look at the letter of a word means. They know what "tiptoeing" implies and that is all they need to imagine

I think Secespitus hits the nail on the head by saying:

People will rarely look at the letter of a word means. They know what
"tiptoeing" implies and that is all they need to imagine the scene.

Imagine being the key word. IMHO, immersion is far more crucial in a story than correctness. The true joy of reading comes when you are so engrossed in a story that you forget you are reading.

Every time an author uses a word that's difficult, for any reason, the reader is forced to pause and take stock. Reality returns, the immersion is lost, and it takes time to recover.

Their brain switches from being immersed in your scene to considering the word tip-hoofing, and whether it feels right or correct. They may like the word and even smile to themselves, but the continuity of the scene has undoubtedly snapped. Moments pass while their brain disengages from processing diction to re-imagining the scene. Meanwhile, your story has lost its flow.

For the same reason, I steer clear of overly-elaborate or complex diction, since immersion is more important than attempts to demonstrate a wide vocabulary.

Edited after OP's edit:

If it's the demon who is nit-picky and obsessed with correctness
(rather than the author as originally understood) there's nothing
wrong with one demon saying tiptoed and the other correcting him to
tip-hoofed for a bit of tongue-in-cheek dialogue. That could add to
the character's roundedness if it's part of who s/he is.

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: I think Secespitus hits the nail on the head by saying: People will rarely look at the letter of a word means. They know what "tiptoeing" implies and that is all they need to imagine

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: Does it really serve a main character to give them one driving want? I often feel that we fall into a trap of believing that we must provide a driving goal for a main character at the outset.

: Beyond letters and diariesâ€”exercises to explore characters' personalities and motivation For a few of my imaginary worlds, my characters write letters to each other. These letters are never intended

: Fleshing out the character motivation from the plot I decided to give a try to the snowflake method. The idea is that you gradually expand the story from a blurb into a full draft. This question

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