Category Archives: writing

Editing and the overuse of words – make each word count

Edit Ruthlessly

I don’t know about you but I find book editing so much more difficult than the actual writing process. It feels as though you are dissecting the life out of your creativity and destroying your story. If you are a good writer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will also make a good editor, entrepreneur or (add any other hat).

If you self-publish then the amount of head-spinning changes that you will have to make throughout the writing, editing, publishing and marketing process are phenomenal and at each stage you are wearing a different hat. It is a cycle that many writers resist until they can get to the stage of writing again and beginning the next book.

At the editing stage there is one issue that has played on my mind recently, the overuse of words. After having put my book through beta readers, two professional edits and many, many of my own edits – I’ve lost count – there are still issues popping up, mainly the overuse of words. I obviously have a penchant for certain words, which I’ve used on multiple occasions, we all do. For example, I found ‘somehow’ more than ten times. What purpose does the word serve? Not much, exactly! So I either slashed or replaced it. You can use the ‘find’ function on word, as it speeds up the process, but don’t automatically replace one word with another. Think about the flow of the sentence, the context and the grammar.

Have a look at these words, all on the top of the lists of overused words:

Awesome

Unique

Interesting

Basically

Literally

Really

What do they tell you? Not a lot. The point is that every word needs to drive the plot forward or give the reader a better understanding of a character, which in turn drives the plot forward. Many writers use ineffective words as padding and it derails the pace. If you want to keep the pace going you need to keep your writing tight.

If I wrote ‘The scene of the crime was literally a swarm of reporters, all really hoping for a snap’ would you keep reading? Would you still be awake?

How about ‘The body lay inside a ringed fence, flash-bulbs lit up the scene.’  Better? These are basic but give you the idea. I would also advise against using words like ‘little’. I found that I’d used the word ‘perched’ twice  for a character who would never ‘perch’. It’s not even an appealing word. What about ‘very’ and ‘get’? It’s easy for these words to go unnoticed but it is important to make each word count.

Which words do you use too frequently?

W. H. Auden

‘Stop all the clocks’ is one of many favourite poems, and I went to visit Auden’s rented summer-house at Kirchstetten, in Austria, recently.
It is where he penned many of his poems and the upstairs room where he wrote has been preserved as a museum, with his book shelves, kettles, empty vodka bottles, typewriter and slippers still in place. I really enjoy both photography and writing, so I wanted to begin this blog by sharing some of the photographs of the upper room of the summer-house, in the hope that it might inspire your writing as much as it did mine. His typewriter sits neatly on his desk, where you can look out over views of the quiet street and lush green trees, made me wonder what it must have been like for him during his writing day, working in a secluded location in the middle the most beautiful countryside. It reminded me of George Orwell’s hideaway, which he also rented on the Isle of Jura, where he penned ‘1984’. There is something about isolation for writers that seems to trigger bursts of creativity. I sometimes find that I need a cafe with noise, and people milling about and chatting, but it is in the quiet places that an idea often forms in a chrysalis, and where the words appear on the page, inviting me on a journey with characters and events.