More about craft

[shalanna]

cookie_dreams called my attention to a Holt Uncensored piece by Pat Holt (whose email newsletter you should consider subscribing to, BTW) that talks about the ten mistakes that writers typically make . . . the ones that are easy to fix, so you should fix them. Lots of good advice here.

One of the ideas in this article is that each book or story may develop a repeated "buzzword" that you'll have to ferret out. I've noticed that sometimes I'll be typing along and use the same word a bunch of times in a row. Barb Blanks (hi, Barb) finds these when she's doing her beta-reader thing and circles them, which is nice. But sometimes even she doesn't notice them.

Some common words are unobtrusive, and you don't have to obsess about not repeating them. But other words that get repeated ("practically," "definitely") might indicate that you need to rethink and reword or rephrase one or another of the sentences. The "old school" used to advise that you use a thesaurus and replace words, but that led to disastrous results and books with weird words the authors didn't really know how to use (because they were unaware of the connotations or the ways the word is usually taken--they only did a "replace.") I once knew a woman who told me, "I wish they didn't have all these words for 'red.' If it's red, say RED. They don't need all these words for 'slow,' either!" She was one of my software test co-workers and said she was going to write children's books "when she found time." She absolutely would not concur with me that words have shades of meaning (especially words for colors! But she hated the nail-polish-shade color words, and that's what she was thinking of when she had her little outburst (grin)). She thought that there were just too many dam' words for her kid to have to learn, and she thought Basic English was fine and dandy. She wasn't terribly exciting to listen to, but then not many engineers are. (GRIN)

Now, I'm not talking about character tags. If you have a character who spouts off all the time and says, "She's practically lucid. We were practically there when she started to shout. I practically threw up," it becomes a defining characteristic (of the character! See how words are related? (grin)) Don't overdo this, because once you've dropped the word in two or three times, it will seem to the reader that the character says this EVERY OTHER WORD. Trust me on that one. But it's a useful device that you're probably doing without even consciously realizing it, because people are like this in real life. We all know the "like, y'know, really" kid. Some characters use "literally" when they mean "figuratively." These are character tags and useful for secondary characters.