These are a few of my favorite words

So I threw most of them out with the trash

I am closing in on the final revision of Book 1 of my upcoming middle-grade epic fantasy titled Dark Circles. It’s almost finished, but since my cover is still in the revision process, I continue to tinker with the content.

Why not, right?

The annoying thing is every time I revise, I find myself making more changes. I believe some writers could revise a single novel for 10 years and still find things they wouldn’t like.

During my latest revision, I decided to check in on a few of my favorite words. And I don’t mean good favorite words. I mean the bad ones—the words that don’t need to be there, at least not in significant numbers.

You see, writers are like athletes. Most of the time, they write by instinct, letting the words flow. Writers are able to do this because they’ve spent most of their lives writing and therefore their instincts are good.

Most (some) of the time.

Bad words often contain more than four letters.

I started out with one of my favorite words: eventually. My lead character Charlie would eventually work up the courage or eventually cross the creek or eventually …

I found 37 uses of eventually. I deleted 32 of them. I was off to a good start.

Then I took on the word really, which is a really useless word, in the same league as very. I found 44 (!) really’s. Good god. I got rid of 39 of them. (At least, I only found 4 very’s, and they were all within dialogue.)

Now I was on a roll. An extremely time-consuming and annoying roll, but a roll nonetheless.

Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash

I weeded out absolutely, totally, realize, wonder, felt, feel, honestly, rather, always, never, literally, just. By the end of it, my fingers were sore. I should have worn gloves.

And there was more. I overused that, then, stuff, things, went, and even the usually harmless word up. As in, Charlie stood, not Charlie stood up.

What’s the point of all this? I return to my athlete analogy. Golfers, for instance, can develop bad habits and not even know it, so they periodically take lessons to weed them out. Writers should do the same.

I’m not saying that writers who avoid these “bad” words are great and everyone else is terrible. Weeding them out is only one aspect of good writing. But it’s a relatively important one.

I guess I should be glad that my cover isn’t ready yet. Otherwise, my novel might have been full of weeds.