Spring cleaning! What do you hope to "clean out" from your writing? What
habits/tropes/words, etc do you want to eliminate?
Is it Spring already? I wish Alberta would get that memo.
Anyway, if I could clean out my writing, hoo-eee there would be quite a few words I'd eliminate. I know that's what revisions are for, but it would save me lots of time if I'd just stopping using them in the first place. Words like, just, so, well, yeah, really, etc. I also find I've got to revise a lot of things like I saw, I looked, I smelled, I heard, I wondered... When I'm writing a first draft, I'm in a hurry to get the story out, and those words get straight to the point. It's in revisions that I have to stretch and find better, more descriptive ways of saying stuff.
This doesn't have much to do with spring cleaning, but I've decided when I go back to the WIP I started ages ago, I'm going to plot a lot more before I start writing again. Usually I get a basic idea and then just wing it, but this leaves me with rounds and rounds of revisions. I'm hoping I can cut that back at least a teensy bit by digging deeper into the plot and characters before I even get started.
What habits would you like to eliminate? Maybe I can add them to my list.
I'm also not quite ready to revise my WIP, and I also need to figure out how to get deeper into my characters. I realized that even after writing a whole first draft, I know damn little about them. I need to give them some interviews or something.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I have a big problem with just. It's all over the place. I apparently just like to use it.
ReplyDeleteI use "that" way too much - maybe I should just put damn and remove it later... :)
ReplyDeleteI know that feeling: "Usually I get a basic idea and then just wing it, but this leaves me with rounds and rounds of revisions." Am in the middle of such revision rounds now! Thanks for an interesting post.
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