Things to do instead of leaving the house

[pjthompson]

everyonesakitty has come up with a fun and horrifying word usage formula. Here are my sins so far in my 109k WIP first draft:

"How many times in your approx 100K-word manuscript do you use the following words? (My offenses are in parentheses)"

1. eyes (292) - in my defense, eyes are an important plot point...oh bother
2. softly (12)
3. gaze (10)
4. stood (65) - ouch
5. walk (80) - ouch
6. just (173) - ouch, one of my Achilles' Heel words I'm supposed to be watching out for
7. carefully (4)
8. nod (50) - yep, they do too much nodding
9. raise (30)
10. glance (11)
11. suddenly (18) - another one I'm supposed to be watching out for
12. dark (73) - um, there's a lot of scenes in the dark
13. sigh (63) - that's painful; my characters do way too much sighing

"Feel free to report your offenses. :D

p.s. In case you haven't put a ton of thought into this, the easiest way to count is to move your 100K words into a fresh doc, then do a replace of each of the words you're counting, and see how many replacements were made for each."

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't know that plain verbs justify outing (stand, walk)--they can be as necessary and as invisible as 'said'. But yeah, on the others.

On a recent rewrite, I was horrified by all the nodding, which on the 54,675 previous drafts I somehow had managed not to see. I got rid of almost all of them.

[pjthompson]

Isn't it odd how you can skim over these things time after time then see them? It never fails to astonish me how I can miss klinkers time and again.

[pjthompson]

P.S. I don't even want to do this with the ms. that Tor has had for the last (almost) ten months. I've purposefully not looked at it since they asked for it and I'm sure it's full of horrors.

[everyonesakitty.livejournal.com]

That just is just a killer. :D

[pjthompson]

Just so!

[frigg.livejournal.com]

Ohh, I'm making up all sorts of excuses not to follow Holly's example. Basically, I'm lazy to put all my writing into one file - and I'm sure the results would be horiffic, especially the gaze and glance. :)

[pjthompson]

Our unconscious habits can really nail us!