Adding Zip to Your Manuscript

Cut and Replace  boring and predictable

 

I’ve been finishing my second novel, Imperfections for the past year. I feel like I’ve finally reached the home stretch. One of the indicators is  the task of scanning for redundancies. I think of them as  lazy  familiar words we fall back upon when banging  out  a story.  Examples: like,  was,  he/him, she/her, they/them, and as; passive verbs, nouns and  phrases penned by an average fifth-grader. Walk, sat, looked, hand, etc. “I looked in his eyes,”  “got in the car”, ‘he took my hand’,  and so forth.

 

I troll the books  of authors I admire   for strategies and stylistic tweaks applying them in my own stories. I employ the use of beta readers. I recon with thesaurus.com .

I am a mercenary in the act of  assist in reducing boring and repetitive words and phrases. I unpack the annals of my aging brain and  attack my manuscript executing  the find  function in the Word program.

The Control and f key combination identifies  68 instances of the offending verb,  ‘walk’.   I apply the literary gorilla wordfare. I slice and burn reducing the offenders to thirty instances and move to the next offending  word trap.

Whump!

 

 

The effort results in a tighter and more resonant story and I avoid the pitfalls of the mundane.