Tag: Editing’
Sloppy Writing 101.55
- by Suzi
I haven’t done any sloppy writing posts for a while, but trust me, I still have lots of issues to fix. The point of doing these posts is to point out ways I’m trying to clean up my writing. There are so many unnecessary words out there that plague my stories, I end up spending more time editing than writing. Way more.
As writers, we are supposed to tighten our prose, but we also need to develop that elusive voice. We want to get rid of all those unnecessary words, but we don’t want our voice to be blah/boring.
Finding that balance is tough, but I’ll keep working on it, keep learning, and hopefully you’ll learn something new too.
Two (often) unnecessary words I use are outside and inside. They can easily be cut without changing the meaning. And really, most of those times, it’s just redundant saying outside/inside. You’ll see what I mean in my examples below, all from The Proper Way to Say Goodbye.
-Her empty voice matched the way I often felt inside.
-I clenched my fists trying to control the anger inside.
-Nervous couldn’t begin to describe my feelings inside.
Apparently I mostly overuse inside when it comes to feelings. And really, does anyone have feelings outside their body? No.
-The cool air outside was a welcome relief.
I didn’t have as big a problem with outside, but this is one I could cut. You know from the prior sentences that she is outside, so I just don’t need it here.
Do you have an outside/inside problem?
Sloppy Writing 101.54
- by Suzi
SORT OF and KIND OF often appear on the lists or words to watch out for. They’re often unnecessary and can easily be deleted. Even if you want it in there as the character’s voice, you should avoid using it too much.
I went through The Proper Way to Say Goodbye and deleted a bunch. No, I didn’t delete all of them from the narrative, and I left most of them in the dialogue, but I still found a lot I didn’t need. Here are my examples.
-I hesitated, deciding it’d be okay if Devyn sort of thought we were dating.
-When people find out about Brock, it sort of scares them away.
-Felt some sort of responsibility to me.
-Although I did sort of miss her music and singing.
In all of the examples above, the sort of doesn’t add anything, so that’s why I deleted them.
Do you use sort of or kind of a lot?
Sloppy Writing 101.53
- by Suzi
To be verbs. They always show up on the list of words you should avoid. To be verbs can often make a sentence weak or passive. And many sentences can be improved by using a stronger verb. A more descriptive word.
So the ones you want to look for are: is/am/are/was/were/be/been/being. Here are some of my examples from The Proper Way to Say Goodbye that I changed.
-Being a shrink, he was an expert in interrogation techniques.
Being a shrink qualified him as an expert in interrogation techniques.
-Most of the room had cleared before my bag was packed.
I packed my bag while most of the room cleared.
- Her face and voice were never far from my mind.
Her delicate face and sexy voice never strayed far from my mind.
-and I committed to running every morning, no matter how hard it was.
and I committed to running every morning, no matter how hard.
-This was ridiculous.
Ridiculous.
You can see how getting rid of the was/were makes and replacing it with a better verb makes a stronger sentence. Was is one of my tough words. I’ve gone through trying to eliminate them. It’s a lot of work, but hopefully my writing is a little better because of it.
Sloppy Writing 101.52
- by Suzi
I’ve got a word to watch for that I’m sure some will be surprised about. WHEN. I’ve seen a few writers’ blogs talk about this, and once I started to look at my manuscript, I could kinda see it.
The problem with WHEN is, sometimes it turns a sentence into a telling sentence. Take this example from The Proper Way to Say Goodbye.
-I took a step backwards when a redhead with pale skin swooped up to me.
The action is backwards. The redhead swoops before Chloe steps back. And maybe in past tense it’s not as big of deal as in present, because in past, the story has already happened, and the narrator knows the outcome and is retelling it. Whereas present is happening right now.
But the other part is that using it as I did above sort of pulls you away from the action. Detaches you from the narrator. Chloe is telling me what happened. She’s not showing me. And it puts a distance between her and the reader.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter, but when it’s a scene where you really want the reader to connect with your character, you want them to feel what’s going on, and not just listen to a character narrating.
Back to my example. Here is my fix:
-A redhead with pale skin swooped up to me, and I stepped backwards.
Just a reversal of order. But I changed this one because, although you don’t see the context, Chloe is taking a big step, doing something she’s totally nervous about. Something she keeps questioning whether or not to do. So I want the reader right there, feeling her uncertainty, her anxiety.
You don’t have to go and delete all your WHENs. Some are fine. But when you want the reader to feel that connection with the character, make it more active by not using WHEN.
Here are a few more I changed.
-I shook my head when Gracie nudged me to talk.
-My heart did a jumpstart when Sasha scooted her chair closer to mine
-A little ping of jealousy zipped through me when she leaned toward him and laughed.
I want you to experience the emotion she’s feeling, and that’s why I changed these ones.
So what do you think? Can you see how WHEN can be a telling word?
If my explanation doesn’t make sense, see Janice Hardy’s site for her explanation, which is much better than mine.
Spring cleaning
- by Suzi
Spring cleaning time.
Okay, maybe it’s not spring here yet. But I’m optimistic that we won’t have snow in April. (But chances of that happening are pretty low.) So I started doing spring cleaning with my writing stuff.
I am one of those people who writes notes on anything. As you can see, I have a variety of things: little brown envelope, small spiral notebooks usually kept in my purse, scratch paper from our printer, whatever piece of paper I could find.
I don’t usually do this with life in general, mostly just writing stuff. Silly things my daughter says. Plot/character ideas, agent stuff, descriptive words I might use in my manuscript. Title ideas and character names. Sometimes dialogue. Anything that strikes me related to my writing. And unfortunately, if I don’t write it down, it has a 95% chance of being forgotten.
So I’m cleaning things up. When I start working on a story, I get an 8×10 spiral bound notebook to write those ideas. I went through all this crap and moved it to the correct notebook. But some of my notes are for stories I wrote a while back, and have no notebook, so then I just throw it into a manila folder. (I have a folder for each project. Even ones that got pushed aside for better ideas. But if I started creating scenes in my head, it has a folder.)
What I’m wondering is, how many people do this too? Do you write little notes like this for everyday things? Or is it mostly writing stuff like me?
Or are you the type of person who will put the information down in the correct place right away instead of leaving notes around the house?
I’m trying to get better at this. I should just leave small notebooks in several rooms, so that it’s there when I need it. But then I have to leave a pencil too. And the kids like to move them around. Or use the notebooks themselves. And if I hide it somewhere, I might forget where it is. 
Maybe I should work on some memory exercises, so I wouldn’t have to write it all down.
So do you write yourself notes like this, or are you an organized person?
Whoops, did it again
- by Suzi
Image courtesy of digitalart / freedigitalphotos.net
When I’m writing, there are those words that I always seem to type wrong. That I can never spell right the first time. And luckily Word tells me it’s wrong. And most of the time, Word knows how to spell—because Word is so darn smart.
It’s annoying as hell because I really know how to spell them right. And when I think about it, I can get them. But for some reasons my brain doesn’t connect to my fingers.
So here are a few of those words that trip me up.
-Nown (noun—as a writer I should automatically get this right, but sadly, I don’t.)
-Awknowledge (acknowledge)
-Ackward (awkward—why do I always get these two backwards?)
-Liscense (license)
And sometimes when I’m typing a word, the wrong one will come out.
-Change (chance)
-One (on—many times I’ll add the e to on. I don’t know why.)
And of course this happens with punctuation.
Question marks. So many times I forget the question mark. I know it’s a question, but I put a period there.
It’s frustrating, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
Does anybody else do this? Or is it just me?
Sloppy Writing 101.51
- by Suzi
Last week I talked about how I was overusing the word MADE when I could be using so much better words. So I’ll do another along that line. GET.
So sometimes I could just delete the GET because it was unnecessary. I tightened my sentence. No, it’s really not a lot of words, but it’s cleaner.
-I slipped over to the water fountain to get a drink as a girl clutching The Time Traveler’s Wife cruised by.
I slipped over to the water fountain for a drink as a girl clutching The Time Traveler’s Wife cruised by.
-I’d rather be teaching upper level classes, but that’s not what TAs get to teach.
I’d rather be teaching upper level classes, but that’s not what TAs teach.
- I need to get to my grading finished.
I need to finish my grading.
Other times I could use a better, more descriptive word. No, they’re not really fancy replacements, but I’d rather use those words than the plain GET.
-Then they’d get quiet.
How about grow instead of get?
-After our next two books, perhaps we can get a Stephen King in.
Why not read? Because that’s what she means.
I suppose GET would be a word you could use to differentiate characters, but I didn’t see that as important here, so I cleaned up as many of them as I could. And I got rid of/replaced about 50 GETs. So not bad.
Do you overuse GET?
Sloppy Writing 101.50
- by Suzi
MADE is one of those words that can often be replaced by something better, more descriptive. So I went and checked The Proper Way to Say Goodbye for my MADEs and made lots of changes.
-Sasha made introductions, but the names didn’t stick.
Why am I using made introductions when I can just use introduced?
-His words made me cringe.
Again, why not just use I cringed. I did this several times, where something made her verb. Not only is it not a great word, it’s Telling.
-We made our way down the less crowded hallway, and I tried to think of something to ask her. Made our way—how boring and blah. In this case ambled fit how they were walking, so that’s what I used.
-“Get a haircut,” she’d tell him, unable to understand her nagging made him grow it longer?
Instead of made, I used encouraged. A better word.
-Being a shrink made him an expert in interrogation techniques.
Qualified was much stronger.
-Made a proper knot.
He actually tied a proper knot, so why not use that.
So you can see that I was using MADE several different ways, and many times I found a much better word. I deleted almost 40 MADES in all, not so bad. Do you use made or make a lot?
Sloppy Writing 101.48
- by Suzi
So back to adverbs again. MOSTLY. I didn’t have a big problem with this one—only used it a few times unnecessarily. But when I did a search, I became aware that I needed to delete/change some because I didn’t want multiple characters using it.
But first, here are a couple examples from The Proper Way to Say Goodbye, where I took out an unnecessary MOSTLY.
-and I mostly stuck to myself, not talking to anyone.
-Her TV lay in a dark wooden shelf stuffed mostly with books and a vase of fake flowers.
And here are a few examples where I changed the mostly to a usually, which is the word Chloe used most often.
-but when I did, I mostly sat in the corner and listened to everybody else talk.
-but now it was mostly Sasha, and it always ended before the kiss.
-Not like Brock who wore mostly black in high school, just to annoy Mom
So, is MOSTLY a problem for you ?
My newest acquisition
- by Suzi
So I got two more signed books to add to my collection. Yay! I won’t go into a long explanation, but basically Kelley York donated some prizes for an auction to raise money for people the Sandy Hook tragedy. And I won.
So two of those many items she donated were signed copies of Suicide Watch —her recently released book, and Hollowed—her first paranormal novel. Both YA. I’ve read Hollowed a while back, but Suicide Watch is new. And I started reading it the day I got it. ‘They’ say the first page is so important and Suicide Watch has a first page that grabs your attention right away and makes you want to keep reading.
Kelley also included 2 signed bookmarks from her book Hushed—which I’ve read and loved too. So thank you, Kelley for everything.
My final Jan Plan update
So I had 2 goals I was trying to accomplish partcipating in for Christa Desir’s JanPlan. Goal #1 was to finish a few things in The Proper Way to Say Goodbye. Well technically I finished the things I’d planned at the time, but then I found lots more things to fix. So I’m gonna call it completed—at least what I wanted to finish when I first made the goals. #2 was to finish the rough draft of my NaNo project. Which I did. Time to let it sit for a bit now.
So I’ll call it successful.
Anybody do Christa’s Jan Plan?
Or, as I ask every time I do an I-got-a-new-signed-book post, do you have any signed books?
