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Writing Peccadilloes [Oh, It’s Tuesday]
Right now, I’m in the middle of a pretty intense rewrite of my second novel. Actually this is the seventh rewrite. I did a sixth rewrite in response to my new agent’s notes, and now I’m doing a seventh to make sure that the sixth rewrite makes sense. This time, however, it’s become like a lover stayed with too long. I can’t help but notice with irritation all of my little writing peccadilloes.
For example, I love to have one character say another character’s name at the beginning of a sentence. “Sharita, you promised you’d come… ” and “Thursday, why are you giving me guff about this” — stuff like that all over the manuscript.
I also have people looking or staring at each other a lot. In fact, I’m kind of obsessed with eyes and action verbs. In this novel, eyes “land” on other characters, they “pin,” they “blaze.” The eyes are basically the hardest working body part in novel business.
And man do I love the word “actually.” The manuscript’s rotten with it. How did that happen?
Hopefully by the time this novel gets to you, all these peccadilloes will have been taken care of or at least scaled back. I take solace in the fact, that all of the writing peccadilloes I noticed on my seventh rewrite of 32 CANDLES are not coming up in the second novel. But I also worry about what new peccadilloes I’ll discover, and therefore have to solve, in the third novel.
Do you have any writing peccadilloes? Let me know in the comments. The peccadilloes rewrite is always miserable work, and it would be lovely to know I wasn’t alone.
featured image credit: jimgrant
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Parentheses!
Oh, I do love parentheses! I don’t blame you.
I’m writing a novel where race matters, and I get SO tired of writing white man this white guy that. Must find a new way to reference that. In your case though, Ernessa, the eyes have it. :-)
Ack, Arlene! That was one of my writing peccadilloes with my first book. Sooo difficult. I’ve found reference hair and eye color to be a pretty good solve.
Thanks for the tip, Ernessa. I’ll keep that in mind!
Hi, Ernessa:
Indeed, you’re not alone with writing pecs. Let me see…one that I love and shouldn’t do is ellipses…although I used them excessively when I take notes or my own personal blog/diary writing, when I do my revisions/rewrites, they got to go out! Too many trailing thoughts would want someone to throw my written pages out the backdoor!!!
And wow…I didn’t think that I was the only one who does a lot of re-writers. People think that writers just spill things perfectly on the page…that ain’t so…no way…whoops, I did it again! *Winks*
~Sophia
Oh, I’m an ellipses FOOL. I don’t even try to fight it anymore. It’s just an incurable affliction as this point.
I’m finding that I have “All of a sudden” or “At that moment” throughout my manuscript! Thank you for calling my attention to this!
Oh, that was all over my first novel, and I was proud for only have 2 “sudden” variations in this one. I haven’t even attempted to tackle “at that moment” — I ‘m going to go after that and “then” in the 3rd novel.
So, in addition to the parenthesis, the ellipses, the over use of exclamation points. I, apparently, love to start my sentence with “So”. It’s just so irritating. I wanna slap this so-er.
I just deleted a couple of “so”s!!!! Thanks!!
So, in addition to the parenthesis, the ellipses, the over use of exclamation points. I, apparently, love to start my sentence with “So”. It’s just so irritating. I wanna slap this so-er.
I say “just” too much.
Oh, me, too! I’m taking so many of them out on this rewrite.