I think we should have a contest—we writers—to see how many times we can move a word around.
I’m pretty sure I’ll win. Take that.
No, really, take the word ‘that.’ I think I’ve written it and deleted it a thousand times, and that was just in the last hour.
See how I snuck that in there? Whoops, again.
Which brings up another pet peeve of mine: Snuck.
“Snuck is a word,” my less literary friends argue.
“But it’s not correct,” I say.
“But it doesn’t matter,” they say. “Everyone uses it.”
Which begs the question: do we write what we speak or do we write by the rules? My answer is we write what we want to write whether it’s high brow or low, whether it appeals to the masses or minuses.
Anything that takes me out of the box (the box being my cubicle) and into a story where I forget there’s an author or my children begging for a snack in the next room—that’s the story for me.
We all have a list of our personal overused words and we all have one, or many, stories to write.
Now it’s just a matter of finding the errant words that may have snuck into your story and replacing them with some descriptive, interesting, unique but not too hard to pronounce ones.
That and finding a damn agent.
I'll just sneak a comment in here :-)
ReplyDeleteMy favorite tool for finding those errant words is the AutoCrit Editing Wizard. It finds all those excess 'that' and 'was' and LY-adverbs. It's embarrassing how much it finds!
What a great tool!
ReplyDeleteOne of the words I used to use far too often in narratives was "immediately." And, yes, I agree with Janine: it is embarrassing (and a bit appalling) once you realize just how much you overuse a certain word or words. As Lisa points out, coming to that realization helps us to rediscover all of the descriptive and more accurate/appropriate words we have in our vocabularies.
Here's a comment on Robine's behalf:
ReplyDeleteI couldn't resist checking out the sneaked-snuck issue. According to Webster's Collegiate, 10th edition (the bible for copy editors), sneaked and snuck are equal variants. "When a main entry is followed by the word or and another spelling, the two spellings are equal variants. Both are standard and either may be used according to personal inclination."
cheers
Robine
(from Jen) I would add that I just checked the Associated Press Stylebook, which is a bible for newspapers and magazines, and it says that sneaked "is the preferred past tense of sneak. Do not use the colloquial snuck." Personally, I prefer snuck! :)
Great post can't wait for the contest! and going to google that AutoCrit Editing Wizard right now - how cool!
ReplyDelete