I’ve been up to my elbows in the muck of revision for a few weeks now. I started off looking at the forest, or the big picture. Have I built tension? Have the characters grown? Does each scene move the story forward? This is the big stuff. Now I’m examining the trees – the little things like dialogue and word choice. And sadly, I have discovered a few writing faults that I haven’t managed to shake. While writing Ospreys in Danger, ‘suddenly’ became a crutch. When the action gained momentum, everything happened ‘suddenly’. Argh. But I managed to catch those before submitting the manuscript.
I am not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener
In this new story – set near Waterton with the same characters as the first book – I seemed to sprinkle ‘then’ throughout the manuscript like salt on popcorn. Here a ‘then’, there a ‘then’, everywhere a ‘then-then’. I had used ‘then’ sixteen times in 6100 words, and eleven of those ‘thens’ started sentences. Egads.
There are many devices that can help you check your word usage. I like Wordle, mostly because it’s fun. You copy your text, select the style you like and paste it into the app. The word cloud that is created shows very clearly which words have been used more than others.
In the manuscript I’m working on now, the characters are Cricket, Shilo, Tyler and Dr. Kate, so it makes sense (and is a bit of a relief) that their names are largest in this word cloud. Wordle can be customized by removing common words, or removing words of your choice, so you can quickly see words you’ve overused. Today, my problem was that imprecise, nasty, four-letter-word ‘then’. I ferreted out each ‘then’, and if I couldn’t replace it with something more specific or descriptive, I exercised the delete button. The story is definitely stronger as a result – and it’s closer to my target word limit! Yay!
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