Lady Dae Writes

            I’m almost done going through proofreading my novel and I have to say, the proofreading is going much better than the overall editing is. But even though I hld steadfast to the rule that I should try not to use adverbs, I find them in novel anyway.

            My favorites? Suddenly, abruptly, really, immediately, and finally. But when I go back through, I find the sentences actually work better without them. In order to illustrate how, let’s talk about why we writers curse adverbs anyway.

            Adverbs are just a lazy way to add impact when we’re too lazy to find better verbs. But not only that, we also use them when we have perfectly suitable verbs, but don’t thing their strong enough. For example:

            Let’s look at the verb suddenly modifies here. It modifies the word burst. When someone burst into a room, the verb implies that someone suddenly came into the room. When my sisters burst into the room, it’s always sudden and that makes the use of suddenly kind of useless here. Therefore,

            Is sufficient to get the meaning across. Nine times out of ten, this is usually the case. Either we already have a sufficient verb or we need to find a stronger one. So since I’ve really said all I have to say on this point, I’m going to give a list of common adverbs, or at least the ones I find in my novel and some I’ve seen elsewhere that really get on my nerve.

            See how useless adverbs are sometimes? In some ways, most ways, you really don’t need them. That doesn’t mean don’t use them, but nine times out of ten, you don’t.

            So the last time I talked about wordiness, it was in reference to scenes or paragraph which was what I did in my previous run-through of my novel, which is more so editing since I was taking out huge chunks. But now as I go through the simpler, less frustrating process of proofreading, I want to talk about those words and phrases that make a story wordy.

            The first time I spoke about this, I didn’t go over the phrases and types of words that make a novel or any story wordy. As I’m writing this though, I’m thinking about some of the stuff I read in my Lit class, particularly the stuff that Mary Shelly’s mother wrote. Talk about a modern editor’s nightmare. It’s full of redundancy, superfluous words, and all kinds of stuff that would make me throw a book across the room, but I that was in the Seventeenth century and the woman was trying to prove a point about the intelligence of women.

            In any case, repetitiveness is one of the things that can really cause a novel to be wordy. In my experience and as I was going through my novel, if you look at the beginning of your sentence and the end of your sentence, you may find redundancy. Many times it’s in those phrases like as a matter of fact, though, however, the reason, because of etc. These phrases or things that mean similar things to them or work in the way these phrases do are where I found most of my redundancies because they can be tagged at either the end or beginning of a sentence and sound good.

            I also found redundancies at the end and beginning of paragraphs. I would say something at the beginning of a paragraph and then say it again at the end. That comes from writing essays where I state my topic or thesis at the beginning and then have to restate it at the end. But in novels and in short paragraphs in particular, that isn’t necessary unless you do so on purpose. But many times, you’ll find that you did it unconsciously in trying to make sure you got your point across.

            Another place I found wordiness is in my verbs, particularly in the use of have, has, and had. I would say things like, She had been working all night in places where I could have easily said, She worked all night or She was working all night.  No in all those forms, the way those verbs are used can change that tense or the implication of the verb just slightly. For instance had been working can mean that she worked and is still working, while She worked all night is strictly past tense. But I was using had been or had something when I could have just used the past tense or a phrase that was equally shorter. It usually made for a much smoother read.

            There were also places where I described something and then said it again later. So for instance, in the beginning of my novel, I establish in some way that my character has dark brown hair. So that means I don’t have to say that she has dark brown hair again every time she runs a hand through her hair.

            I also don’t constantly have to remind the reader that someone is beautiful or even waste time on telling what my character is wearing every scene unless it’s relevant to the story. So while it’s not necessary to take all those references out, you don’t need to throw it in the reader’s face either, even if it is relevant.

            Also,  I have to talk about the adverbs. Now I've gotten good with not using those, but I seemed to like these three words a lot: suddenly, abruptly, finally, especially when I got towards the climax and battle scenes. It's not that adverbs are bad, but they usually can be replaced with stronger verbs and if you need an adverb, try using ones that don't end in -ly. In my case, the verbs I had were just fine and needed no adverbs to help build them up. So many of them were cut and those that weren't, I might go cut anyway and find a stronger verb to help.

            So this was just some of the things I observed when I was editing and that I will certainly be on the lookout for as I proofread. But no more tweaking the story thankfully. The story and structure are solid. Not to practice writing queries…

As I comb through my novel this last final time, I am seriously understanding the meaning of what people say when they say something’s wordy.

All writers have the tendency and something like that is perfectly fine in the first draft, but as I edit, I really see how it drags down the story. The use of adverbs for instance is a common way to find wordiness. Take that sentence right there above that I opened with.

See how wordy that is. I can get the same effect with fewer words. Mind you, I am habitually wordy on this since it is a blog, but it’s good to know I do know what I’m talking about when I can critique and dissect my own work on the spot. Anyway, let’s revise that.

Note that I only corrected some of the wordiness and didn’t put exactly what people. It’s not needed for this lesson. But you can see that we get the same impact. In fact, the impact is better that the original sentence because we don’t have to sort through all those unnecessary words. But not only do I have to look for adverbs, adjectives and other words that weight the sentence down, I have to look for entire scenes and paragraphs that don’t move the story forward.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t go into detail and can’t have paragraphs that go into detail (In fact I may need to incorporate some detail when I run back through for proofreading), but I’m talking about those scenes that are just there for the simple purpose that there are there and since I’m working with an old manuscript, there are a lot of them. So you have to ask yourself, does this scene really belong here and it hurts to do for I had some really witty lines in some of the scenes I wrote, but the story was better in the long run.

Now this will seriously hurt your word count, as so far I’m minus about a thousand words, but that’s much less than the last edit which means I probably got it all. I’m looking at going from 72k to 65k, which is fine. It may become more because I will definitely add more detail as I reread it for flow and clarity, but the good thing about trimming in writing is that you don’t have to wait for it to grow back like you do when trimming a bush. If you think you trimmed too much, go back to the other version.

So I just felt like writing this as I come to the end of editing my novel. Can’t wait to be finished. I’m still not sure if I’m going to query agents or self-publish as an e-book, but I’ll see. Hope this helped someone to know that they’re not alone. This veteran amateur is doing some of the same things you are right now.