Are there any words, phrases, character types, or other things you keep falling back on in your writing? What are the things you love to write a little too much?
10 thoughts on “Things We Love To Write A Little TOO Much”
It changes from book to book. Mrs. B, my first reader, always finds something I repeat. In one book, characters kept putting a hand on other characters’ shoulders.
In one book I overused weird, which I found odd. In another it was odd, which is just plain weird.
🙂
I stare too much. Or my characters do.
I struggle with “staring” too.
Also this:
“headed to/toward/out”: Are these phrases “invisible words” like “he said” that it’s OK to repeat over and over or are they phrases that I need to find better alternatives to, so as not to over-use?
Just finished going over final edits. Everything and everyone moved. Moved. Moved.
I use SmartEdit to catch a lot of repeat offenders, but even so, things insist on sneaking back into the manuscript after I hit Save.
Gremlins.
Too many green eyes. Green isn’t all that common. Also, people cry out a lot. He cried. She cried.
A lot of shrugging. And in a recent workshop I took from Steven James, he laid down a rule. Only one description involving eyebrows per book (which got a laugh but also had some participants doing a search for “brows”)
I love Nelson Demille. He tends to favor a phrase that I rarely, if ever, see others use. Not a bad thing, so this doesn’t really fit in with the “use too much” instruction here… it’s just sort of unique to him, though always used appropriately, and never to an extent that it detracts. It is:
… apropos of nothing… (then he goes on to state whatever the character said or did that was apropos of nothing)
Sort of a Demille trademark meme. I try to find it, at least once, in every title of his.
I haven’t read him but I may be related to him. I know that I am related to Cecil B. Demille. He is a multiple (I’m not sure how many), great-uncle. My mother’s grandmother’s maiden name was Demille. I am the poor relation. 🙂
It changes from book to book. Mrs. B, my first reader, always finds something I repeat. In one book, characters kept putting a hand on other characters’ shoulders.
In one book I overused weird, which I found odd. In another it was odd, which is just plain weird.
🙂
I stare too much. Or my characters do.
I struggle with “staring” too.
Also this:
“headed to/toward/out”: Are these phrases “invisible words” like “he said” that it’s OK to repeat over and over or are they phrases that I need to find better alternatives to, so as not to over-use?
Just finished going over final edits. Everything and everyone moved. Moved. Moved.
I use SmartEdit to catch a lot of repeat offenders, but even so, things insist on sneaking back into the manuscript after I hit Save.
Gremlins.
Too many green eyes. Green isn’t all that common. Also, people cry out a lot. He cried. She cried.
A lot of shrugging. And in a recent workshop I took from Steven James, he laid down a rule. Only one description involving eyebrows per book (which got a laugh but also had some participants doing a search for “brows”)
I love Nelson Demille. He tends to favor a phrase that I rarely, if ever, see others use. Not a bad thing, so this doesn’t really fit in with the “use too much” instruction here… it’s just sort of unique to him, though always used appropriately, and never to an extent that it detracts. It is:
… apropos of nothing… (then he goes on to state whatever the character said or did that was apropos of nothing)
Sort of a Demille trademark meme. I try to find it, at least once, in every title of his.
I haven’t read him but I may be related to him. I know that I am related to Cecil B. Demille. He is a multiple (I’m not sure how many), great-uncle. My mother’s grandmother’s maiden name was Demille. I am the poor relation. 🙂