What's In a Word

Do you have a favorite word you lean on in conversation? We all do – maybe it’s “like” or “well.” Could be “you know” or “um” or even a phrase like “no way.” Well, authors have words and phrases they lean on, too. That’s great in a draft…it's essential to get the story out and on paper, or hard drive as the case is today. Don’t even worry about them at that point.

Then you have to be relentless as you scour your manuscript. How many times do you start a sentence with “but” or “and,” “however” or “although”? Another word many of us are guilty of using as a prop is “that.” Use the “Find” command sometime and take a look at how many times these words sneak into a manuscript.

Don’t get me wrong -- sometimes one of those is exactly the right word choice, but many times those words creep in because our minds are zipping along as we write. It gives us a moment to get the sentence flowing as we go. Kind of like that “um” partway thru a spoken sentence. It seems invisible until you start to hear the other person saying it, like, you know, every couple of sentences. Then that’s all you can, like, hear! You start to sort of tune out…or focusing on it instead of what the person is saying!

So, take a few minutes and check out the repeats in your next completed first draft. Don’t be too worried too at what you find – we all do it as we write.

Next step, though, is to start striking through those handy lean-ons relentlessly.

Libby McKinmer
Romance with an edge
www.libbymckinmer.com
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The curse of pet words by Chester Campbell

When I got the initial edit of Secret of the Scroll (my first published mystery) back from the editor, I shuffled through his nine pages of notes and stopped on this one:

"For some reason you like the color blue. Nothing wrong with that but if it breaks the mood of the story, then we have a problem. You have used blue as follows:

"blue cardigan/sweater

"blue car number one, Israel

"blue car number two, Nashville

"Father Coughlin decked out in blue

"Worker at Kibbutz in blue workclothes

"Blue blazer, and (dark) blue vehicle, shirts

"And the piece de resistence! Jill in oversize blue dress!

"When the reader starts counting the number of times you use something, you've lost him. He's detached from your book. The magic is gone."

Thank God for Word's search and replace function. What Bob Middlemiss mentioned was like the first dandelion in the front yard. When I did a search on "blue," I found the word appeared 48 times in the manuscript. After paring it down for the final version that went to the typesetter, only 17 blue mentions remained. They were spread around over the course of 264 pages.

In subsequent manuscripts, I have found other favorites that turn up way too often. Words like "suddenly." In her book Don't Murder Your Mystery, Chris Roerden cautions, "One 'suddenly' per book, please."

Another of those unbiquitous terms I have encountered too many times in my prose is "laughed." He laughed. She laughed. They all laughed. I wind up going through and creating some other way to indicate amusement.

Then there are words like "almost" and "about" that should be turned into definite quantities whenever possible. And there's "just," which one blog titled "Just Is a Four-Letter Word" went on to say, "It's a dangerous word that should be used as sparingly as possible."

These are "just" a few of the words that hound me. What about you? What words do you find difficult to eliminate from your writing?

Check The Marathon Murders for a sample of my efforts.