In the wake of the Cassie Edwards plagiarism scandal, the good people at Dear Author have posted this article called “The Proper Application of Fair Use.”
It’s easy to read, not overly laden with legal jargon, and I found it quit interesting and useful.
Slow and steady wins the race, and I managed to stick with it all month. Once I hit 35,000 and finally found my story, things really picked up, and it became much easier to write. For the past few days, my word count has been much higher.
Whee! I did it!
Congratulations to all the other NaNo-ers. I’m starting to think that just surviving is a pretty big challenge 
Sometimes when I’m reading something, either as an editor as a reader, I come across an awkward or clumsy construction that makes me stop and think, “Why on earth did this writer do this?” Nine times out of ten, it is to avoid “overusing” a common word.
Thing is, though, common words are just that: common. So common, in fact, that they’re invisible. The eye goes right over them. Examples of this are: he, she, is, was, were, did, had (as a helping verb), character names, and said.
This is important because a reader will not notice that you’ve used a character’s name twice in the same sentence if it’s needed to make the meaning clear. A reader will, however, notice if you’ve used some clumsy descriptor:
Mary burst into the room and upon seeing the hostages tied up in a corner, the tall blonde rushed to their aid.
Not only does it sound funny, but it actually makes things more complicated, especially to a nonvisual reader who might ask, “Okay, but where did the blonde come from?”
Also, a reader will not notice if you use said in dialogue attribution, because that’s what people do: they say their dialogue. They do not cough, smile, beam, chortle, chuckle, or laugh their dialogue. Try it sometime – you’ll find that it’s not really possible to speak while you’re performing these actions. A reader is far more likely to notice – and not in a good way – the avoidance of the word said than the overuse of it.
There are some other verbs that can be used. Asked, answererd, replied, and the occasional retorted are just fine. But if you’re going to use another word for said, you need to make sure of a couple of things.
First, is the verb describing a way of speaking? Ask is. Smile is not.
Second, is the verb intransitive? Far too often I see a dialogue attribution such as: she greeted, she admonished, she reprimanded with no direct object. A transitive verb must have an object, and to include the direct object (“Hello!” she greeted her sister.) is often painfully redundant, so you have the choice of either eliminating the dialogue or using a different verb.
Finally, a lot of writing/self-editing guides suggest eliminating unnecessary instances of the word had but do not go on to explain (probably assuming that writers will know that) this does not apply to formation of the past perfect tense (I had already been there for two hours when she finally arrived).
Now, off to work!
This year I started trying to write again. I’m not entirely sure why; maybe it was that I started travelling again and it made me start thinking, or maybe things had just percolated long enough in my brain that I could start putting words to paper.
Usually I’m happy just writing stuff down and letting a couple of friends read it, but over the past year or so I’ve been encouraged to read calls for submissions and send things in, which has brought me to a previously unknown level of sheer terror. I think people tend to assume they’re learning something about the writer when they read, and I’m not particularly comfortable with that idea, so I don’t like to put myself out there in a public way.
Anyway, in the past six months I’ve sent submissions to four anthologies. So far two accepted and two pending. I’m fully expecting those to be rejections, but at least I tried, right?
::bites fingernails again::
Here are some quick and easy things you can do to tighten up a manuscript and bring down the word count without having to rewrite:
1. “started to,” “continued to,” “commenced to,” “began to.” Most of the time, these are unnecessary. Not only that, but they imply that the action will at some point be interrupted – “She started to wash the dishes, but the doorbell rang” – or that something else is going on – “She continued to wash the dishes as the fight raged on in the dining room.” You can trim a lot of fat by deleting these constructions when they aren’t needed.
2. “that.” Another word that is often used unnecessarily and can be cut without affecting the sentence.
3. “proceeded to.” I’m not sure how this construction became so popular, but I delete it almost every time I see it outside of dialogue.
Happy Mother’s Day!
