Did your mother ever threaten to
wash your mouth out with soap for saying naughty words? I remember watching my
brother get his mouth washed out with soap. The terrible, naughty word he dared
to speak was…“shut up.”
You can make a safe assumption that I
never heard the words most people consider bad enough to be offensive—well,
until I started riding the school bus, but that’s another story! I certainly
wouldn’t have said them. Imagine my surprise when I started getting edits that
were color-coded with all the bad words I needed to take out, words that I used
every day in front of my mother!
Actually.
Just. That. Completely. Even.
Actually,
when I’m just writing the draft, these
are words that seem completely justified, even necessary. For the most part,
however, my writing becomes stronger when I remove them.
Speaking of stronger, I needed to
obliterate passive voice from my writing.
Seem/seemed.
Feel/felt. Made/make. Thought. Believed. These are filtering words that I
blogged about here. They need to go. http://saradanielromance.blogspot.com/2013/03/tuesday-toolbox-lose-filter.html
Was.
This passive verb, along with his buddies had
and could, takes over my drafts and
leaves me with the unpleasant soap residue in my mouth. Here’s an example from
my latest manuscript:
Draft: He was treating her with the same polite distance…
Revised: He spoke to her with the same polite distance…
The revised version not only shows the
hero performing an action. It also gives the reader a more concrete impression
of his previously vague treatment.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
Eradicating overused words and passive sentence construction is something I
struggle with during each book. But I now recognize my weakness words, and I
use Microsoft Word to search for and highlight each one. I look forward to the
day when I address them all before they reach my editor’s desk and I save
myself from a thorough mouth-washing.
Excellent post, Sara!
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