Hello, dreamers. As tends to be the case, my new year has begun much as the last one ended: with editing. With querying right around the corner and the January short fic sub window open, I have a lot of polishing to do before I can get back to actual writing.

Every writer has their own process for editing. There are basic conventions, but a lot of it is dealer’s choice, as it were. However, if there’s one aspect of editing that’s universal, it’s looking for overused words.

Your Favorite Words

I used to not think too much about overusing words or phrases. Then, I made my first editing pass through Seven Days on Samarkand. And when I did, I quickly noticed something:

My characters were nodding a lot. A whole lot.

It was awful. I had far too many scenes where the characters were constantly nodding to one another. It felt like I’d written a story about a cast of bobbleheads. Real people don’t do that. Or at least they really shouldn’t. But I began to realize I’d used it as a crutch. Whenever I was trying to break up dialogue with body language, I just defaulted to “He/she nodded”. I tried to switch it up, thinking I was being clever (“He nodded deeply”, “she gave a staccato nod”, “he gave a reaffirming nod”). But I wasn’t being clever. I was creating bobbleheads.

At first, I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. After all, I’d read plenty of novels, and had never been bothered by repeated words or actions. Then I realized that was because I’d never read a published novel that had them. The ones that did (like the one I’d just written) never made it that far.

So I went about finding other things for my characters to do (disruptions I call them; little tidbits to break up dialogue). In doing so, I managed to come up with distinctive tics for my characters. Not only did I stop them from being bobbleheads, but I also deepened characterization with fairly minimal effort.

And it’s not like this was a problem for just one piece of fiction. When writing my first book, I used “suddenly” to the point where I doubt anyone could be surprised by anything by the end of the book. Just recently, while working with my editor on the story appearing in this year’s Writers of the Future anthology, she asked me to limit my usage of the phrase “trailed off”, noting it appeared over twenty times. And that was in a good story. One that had already won a prestigious contest and been picked up for publication.

So believe it or not, this is a common, and persistent, problem for writers.

The easiest way to deal with it, or at least start, is every editing writer’s favorite word processor feature: “Find and Replace”. If you feel like you’re seeing a particular word too often, you can find every instance of it, then quickly adjust to make things less repetitive. Of course, when dealing with an entire novel, that can be cumbersome (using “Find and Replace” on Seven Days on Samarkand, for instance, is a great way to crash Google Docs).

And, of course, there’s always the potential to go too far the opposite way: whip out the thesaurus and start using obscure words out of fear of using the same word twice. At best, you end up sounding like Tom Clancy (one of my favorite authors, and one of very few who frequently sent me to the dictionary). At worst, you end up sounding like you swallowed a thesaurus and are now regurgitating its contents, like a particularly wordy owl.

So, how do you know how much usage of one word or phrase is enough?

Well, there are conventions out there, but the first thing any writer learns about conventions is that they’re always guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules (remember the owl). Some suggest you should only use the same word once per paragraph. Others once per page. Yet others once per chapter. And I’ve seen more than one amateurish writer (who didn’t realize they seemed amateurish) who insisted you could only use a word once in a novel.

Obviously that’s ridiculous. I’ve seen the results first-hand, and to my knowledge, not one of those books has been published. But basically, if you find yourself continuously leaning on a word, you should find another way to put things. Adjectives tend to be a common crutch, especially for beginning writers (like my former favorite word, suddenly). I’ll get to adjectives in a future “Cutting Room” post, but suffice to say you should try to minimize adjective use anyway.

Another common problem to watch for is what’s known as a “word echo”. This is the term for using the same word (or variations of said) repeatedly in sentences close together. It’s seen most commonly in the opening words of sentences or paragraphs (beginning a series of sentences with “The”, “I”, or “He/she” are the most common). Consider this example:

He looked around, and he could see her. He saw her flower-print dress. He could see that she was smiling. And he saw she was smiling at him.

In a first draft, this seesaw of a paragraph is probably fine. But it can’t stand up to editing. What’s more, its unnecessarily wordy. After editing, it might look more like this:

Then he saw her, in her flower-print dress. She looked up at him, and as their eyes met she smiled. He grinned, knowing her smile was for him.

Still not perfect (gimme a break; I’ve been editing, and I just came up with that in a couple seconds). But not only does it eliminate the word echo, but it’s more impactful.

Writing is fun. If it’s not, trust me, you’re doing it wrong. Editing is not fun. But it’s the difference between an okay book and a good, or even great one. And though a story will cross a lot of desks before it makes it to print, the first desk is the most important: the writer’s. Eliminating repetition is one of the all-important first steps. It can improve flow, bring your characters to life, and make it clear to whoever’s behind the next desk that you take your work seriously. – MK