A Great Idea for Later Drafts

Happy New Year everyone! 

I was reading blogs yesterday, and I came upon this one by Dianne Salerni. Know what a Wordle is? I went to the site, and pasted in my ms. (At first this was unnerving but I don’t think they keep them on file and self-publish these things or anything.) Quickly, I got this:

 

Isn’t it pretty? Eve and Jane are my MCs (and Eve is definitely the center of the story, that’s why she’s so big.) Liam is the third biggest character, and there’s a magical diary, and Audrey is the antagonist…there are two aunts, and a deck prism and whaling ships and the beach. So it’s very cool!

However. See how big the words back and just are in my Wordle?

They are not important. They are words to which I seem to have an attraction. An unhealthy attachment, you might say--in fact, I was not surprised to see just. Just and I are old friends.

Okay, fine. My name is Kristen, I am a writer, and I am an over-user of the words back and just.

These are some examples of where I found the little critters hanging around in my manuscript:

Come back (which can often be come here)

Rocking back and forth—do you really need the back and forth? How else do you rock?

Going back to the attic, trudging back home…I wrote this kind of thing zillions of times and found if I took out the back, the sentence either didn’t change or was stronger.

Just wait and see what happens

Just as she was thinking…

He would just lie in the cool dirt and smile…

The lies were just getting out of control…

My son read over my shoulder while I was deleting the words time after time, and he started laughing. “Mama! You said just in the last sentence, and here you are using it again!” “Mama—you used back in the same sentence as the word backpack!”

Etc.

I read every sentence in which I used these words. I decided if the meaning didn’t change when I removed the word, then I didn’t need it. Many times the word back or just did magnify the meaning, but since my motivation was to make the words smaller on the Wordle, I thought about how to remove them if I could. And most of those times, I could indeed change the entire phrase or sentence in order to leave them out, and found that the writing was better with the new sentence.

In short, I tricked myself into working harder with a fun website. Yup, like I do with Peter and his homework. Because most of the time, I found these two words to be examples of lazy writing.

I realize one and like are also huge. I need to look into that.

Thank you to the Wordle, and to Dianne Salerni and her daughter for giving me the idea to do this exercise--even if you're not in the middle of a later draft and you want to see what your overuse words are, paste in a bit of the ms and see what happens!