Writing - self-editing

There are many tasks a writer must perform when self-editing. At the later stages, when the book is as good as finished – that is it’s ready for a final read-through – one task is to check for word repetition.

No writer can avoid this happening; at certain times in the writing process, certain words cling on, sometimes in the subconscious, and are used too often. Each writer will have their own words and phrases which they tend to fall back upon without even noticing. At the time of writing there’s nothing wrong with this, it’s good to maintain the writing flow rather than be concerned with word-repetition.

After having written well over 2 million published words, I’m aware of some words that I tend to opt for too frequently, hence the list below.

In my years of editing other people’s work I find that the most repeated words for many an author are: smiled, laughed, nodded, saw, pointed, suddenly, and shrugged. One of the biggest mistyped is ‘though’ for ‘through’ and vice versa, which a spell-checker won’t detect.

Bearing in mind that this word-repetition check was against my current book of about 105,000 words, there are not too many word repetitions anyway; mainly because I’ve become familiar with most, so consciously avoid ‘laughed’ and ‘sighed’, for example, while not interfering with the flow.

I recommend you conduct a search for certain words. You might be surprised at the number of highlighted words you discover on the same page and often close together!

My search turned up these shown below.

Once you’ve found the word, scroll through the text, examining each highlighted example, seeing if the word is actually necessary at all, or maybe a different word might suffice and be an improvement. Try to reduce the frequency of the word where several are shown in close proximity; it’s not unusual for the same word to appear four or more times in a single paragraph!

This process sometimes reveals inconsistencies and logic errors in the text, which is all to the good. 

Certain words are not always necessary – the biggest culprits being ‘down’ as in ‘sat down’ and ‘up’ in ‘stood up’; there are similar variants.

 Repeated words template – August 2021

Repeated word	Before	After edit	Repeated word	Before	After edit
smiled	32	16	shook	37	28
nodded	84	32	appeared	47	39
laughed	14	11	peered	21	15
grinned	13	11	abruptly	13	11
sighed	14	12	shrugged	22	16
looked	55	38	eyed	20	17
moment	32	19	instant	22	20
glanced	25	21	gazed	6	6
few	68	44	some	23	22
down	103	67	up	180	116
out	103	67	back	80	66
just	51	34	askance	2	2
called	36	31	glimpsed	14	12
saw	36	35	gestured	23	20
walked	29	26	sensed	26	21
ran	43	32	believed	20	17
pointed	27	23	strode	17	15
suddenly	11	10	away	73	52
seemed	91	49	off	85	62
felt	69	58	noticed	44	40
thought	50	41	though	91	59
stepped	53	35	turned	80	51

You will see on the list that some variants are shown close together: for example, moment and instant; few and some; gazed and glanced; down and up. So beware of substituting one repetitive word with another on the list; yes, it can be done, but adjust the total so you know where you are.

Good luck.

Book appraisal - MAKE ME

Lee Child’s twentieth Jack Reacher novel Make Me (2015) offers more of what his millions of readers have come to expect.

It begins with the clandestine burial of a guy called Keever, which is momentarily disturbed by the passing of a delayed night train, which is significant…

Reacher has dropped off at a one-horse town called Mother’s Rest. He’s merely curious how the place got its name, so stopped for an overnight stay to find out; he doesn’t get to know until p491; in the meantime, he meets retired FBI special agent Michelle Chang and learns she’s now running a private investigation business and is the backup called in by her associated Keever...

The pair hit it off and Reacher becomes intrigued by the apparent disappearance of Keever.

Their enquiries seem to upset some locals who object to their presence. Reacher’s first set-piece of violence (p92) deters two of them effectively. Chang and Reacher’s investigation takes them beyond the town (to Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and Chicago) and delves into the unpleasant depths of the internet, where lurks the dark side of human nature.

The pace begins in a leisurely fashion and gradually picks up until the set-piece denouement.

Child has a legion of fans because he writes page-turning stories that pull you in, and this book is no exception. It’s a fast read.

Many fellow writers are not fans of his books – for a number of reasons, not least perhaps because he isn’t ‘literary’ and uses simple vocabulary. [Reacher went and took a shower’ (p68)]. He’s not averse to repeating words in the same paragraph or page. He describes at great length places and buildings that have very little relevance to the storyline or scenes in the plot.

His book titles are often quite odd, too: Make Me is a good example. The only place I found those words was on p54: ‘Plus he calibrated it to make me younger than I am.’ The words may have popped up elsewhere. The meaning can be either ‘force me, if you can’ or ‘you have identified me’ – perhaps!

He’s good at dialogue. There can be pages of it, and not that many cues to signify who is speaking because it’s obvious in the context of what is being said.  When he does employ a speech attribution it is mostly ‘he said’ – Reacher paused a beat and said, ‘Who exactly are you?’ Or: Reacher said, ‘That’s you?’  Occasionally, he varies this: ‘Interesting,’ Reacher said. He doesn’t bother with alternatives to ‘said’ and it works just fine for him and, clearly, his readers.

He injects humour. ‘It’s going to be like picking a lock with spaghetti.’ (p162)

He doesn’t use f-words, settling for ‘bullshit’ most of the time. By doing this he probably alienates some readers who prefer more ‘realism’; yet this is fiction and escapism, so these thrillers don’t have to employ gutter language to strengthen the story. Indeed, he probably gains readership because he doesn’t have his characters ‘effing’ at all and sundry.

He’s good at confrontation and fight scenes. Tension is raised and details are dispensed for what might take only a few seconds but in slow-time seem longer as the words pour out. It is remarkable what can pass in the mind in a fraction of a second at heightened awareness, and he manages to convey this very efficiently on several occasions. Adam Hall’s secret agent Quiller would treat combat in a similar analytical vein.

He’s a master at cranking up the tension in a scene:

‘I’m getting impatient here.’

Wet lips.

Moving eyes.

Urgent.

No response.

Then Reacher… (pp334/335) Very filmic.

So, whatever Child’s perceived faults, his phenomenal success suggests that he has captured that elusive readability trait other writers hanker after.  

Editorial comment

More than once Child writes: ‘Reacher said nothing.’ (for example, pp291, 353 and 407). Sometimes other characters get the same line. Interestingly, there’s a book entitled Reacher Said Nothing by Andy Martin, which looks over Child’s shoulder while he writes Make Me. (It’s now only available second-hand on Amazon, and at silly prices too!)

An observation is made when a magazine is found with a bookmark at the front of an article. Reacher’s assumption is that the magazine owner hasn’t read the article yet. (p108). This doesn’t necessarily hold up: the marker could be there for future reference, the piece having already been read.

A number of significant if minor characters don’t have names. They’re ‘the one-eyed guy’, ‘the Moynahan who had gotten kicked in the balls’, ‘the spare parts guy from the irrigation store’, ‘the counterman’, ‘the hog farmer’, ‘the guy from Palo Alto’ and ‘the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair’ – the latter is sometimes shortened to ‘the man with the jeans and the hair’. The repetition of these ‘names’ becomes tedious, though they’re probably easier for the reader to identify rather than a single name. I appreciate the predicament; multiple characters with names can become confusing. Sometimes you can identify a bit-player by their description, which I’ve done before: One-eye, Spare-parts, Blow-dry, maybe. One of the most overused words in the novel is ‘guy’; it grates.  

‘Mrs Eleanor Hopkins, widow, previously a wife and a laboratory researcher…’ (p271) Well, yes, she would be a wife previously if she’s now a widow…

Writing – word-count – progress

From time to time, we hear writers talking about how many words they’ve written ‘today’. 

Some writers say that a book has taken months or even years to write. But in all probability it hasn’t. The writer wasn’t spending all hours on that book. The work was interrupted by ‘life’ – family, friends, work that pays the bills, holidays, and a multitude of other commitments that get in the way.

Writing a novel, I feel, is work, not play. Enjoyable work, granted. But it should be treated the same as ‘work’. 

The normal working day consists of eight hours. Yes, I’m sure that many writers spend eight hours in any particular day working on their book – that is, thinking, researching, juggling words and phrases, tweaking, and even writing new material.

For quite a while now, I’ve advocated that it’s helpful to keep a record of progress, and one of the ways to do that is by using a spreadsheet.

I write in ‘sessions’ – they may be for an hour, 2 hours, or even 30 minutes. I record each time period session. When the sessions add up to 8 hours, I call that a ‘day’.

For interest, I’ve looked back on my latest work, The Khyber Chronicle, which has just hit 45,000 words (about 35,000 to go!)

For the last 5 days of work (that is, 5 x 8-hour sessions), the word-count came out thus:

Day     word-count

1          5895

2          4816

3          5189

4          4975

5          8231

I go into this aspect of calculating word-count on pp18-19 in Write a Western in 30 Days – with plenty of bullet points! (Suitable for not only writers of westerns, but writers of all genre fiction). There are a few good reasons to apply this method. It isn’t the only method, it may not be the best, but it works for me.

Naturally, writing the requisite number of words is only the beginning. Then comes the self-edit, the checks for logic, plot holes, lack of description and all the rest. But getting the words down in the first place is the most important part. Something to build on, to hone thereafter.

Good luck!