Is there an easy way to do this without using structs?

If I do use a struct, where will I need to use malloc?

here is what i have so far with questionsr:

struct array_contents
{
        char *word;

/*this is how I declare the array*/

contents word_array[ARRAY_SIZE] = {"\0"};

/*is this the right way to initially set all cells to null? I  get a
warning saying that they are different types*/

to copy the word into the array, do I just do something like this:

word_array[i].word = w;

or do I need to say word_array[i]->word = w;

or do I need to use strcpy to do it?

it's been a while since i've had to mess with pointers so I forgot how
it works.  

You're welcome to look over some C that I wrote to do this kind of thing.
It's located at http://www.iedu.com/mrd/c/tokenize.c and
http://www.iedu.com/mrd/c/tokfile.c -- with any non-standard functions
used lurking in the same directory.

I don't think I filtered the tabs out of those files, so you might want to
set tabs to 3 for viewing.

and you have an array of string pointers. Or if you want to make its
lengh runtime adjustable use

char **spa;

if ( ( spa = malloc( HOW_MANY_DO_YOU_NEED * sizeof( char * ) ) ) == NULL )
    exit( EXIT_FAILURE );

Now you can store your strings either as references (if they have already
malloc()ed somewhere else in your porgram) or you can malloc() memory
for each string and then strcpy() it, for example

for ( i = 0; i < max_strings; i++ )
{
    if ( ( spa[ i ] = malloc( strlen( old_string[ i ] ) + 1 ) ) == NULL )
        exit( EXIT_FAILURE );
        strcpy( spa[ i ], old_string[ i ] );

If that is the case, then you define the appropriate type of pointer
(either struct* or char**) and use malloc to allocate enough space for
whatever size array you determine at run time.

Consider your initialization.  By specifying only one initializer, you
are saying initialize element 0 of the array to the value specified
and set all the remaining elements (if any) to the appropriate form of
the value zero.
        Since the array is an array of non-function pointers, the
appropriate form of zero is NULL.  That is OK for the remaining
elements.
        Element 0 has a problem.  Element 0 is a pointer to struct.  The
initializing value is a quoted string.  (To be specific, the quoted
string is converted by the compiler to an array of char.  In this
case, the array contains two elements:  the first is a '\0' which you
specified and the second is '\0' which the compiler automatically puts
at the end of every quoted string.)  In this context, the array of
char will be treated as a pointer to char whose value is the address
of the first character in the array.  You end up trying to assign a
char* to a variable that is expecting a struct*.  This is not one of
the automatic pointer conversions the compiler will do for you.

If you want to set all the pointers to NULL, change your
initialization to
                = {NULL}.

Also note that none of the elements of word_array point to valid
structures yet.