Thursday, April 28, 2011

Go-To Words

In my fiction, I notice that certain words keep making the rounds.

  • "Looks." The biggest offender. "He looks like he smells bad cheese," etc. I try to vary it up with eyebrows raising, faces scrunching in some manner. There's a lot of looking.
  • "Even," "ever." These two have appeared more than usual in the YA nov. I guess it makes sense when you consider sixteen-year-old speak: "You think you know my life? You don't even know!" Not to hate on teen-speak whatso-ever. Everything seems extreme, and not very even.
I don't think it's necessary to pull out fancy words to eliminate the plainer ones, like "look," but I do want to be cognizant of boring patterns so I can break them up. Same with sentence structure. I tend to have a full sentence, and then a fragmented list. Going a little like this. Then a little like that. And a little repetition. I need to mix it up, you know what I mean? Yeah? You know.

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