I just got back from an intensive weekend course. Please pardon this repeat from 2018. The problem still arises. This time it was/is “made sense—good sense.”
Really. Very. Brilliant. Then really again.
Over and over and over, sometimes three or four times on a page, for two or three pages.
Tic, tic, tic.
We all, as writers, have problems that seem to return. We might not even be aware of them until someone from “outside” says, “Hey Bob, you used ‘very’ eight times on this page. Really.”
Tic, tic, tic.
In my case, my mind will find a word and repeat it. The usage is always appropriate, but using “really” six times on one page is not good. That is, unless you have a character with a verbal tic, or you are deliberately emphasizing something for a reason, like foreshadowing.
The first time, it was “very.” Thanks be, Nas Hedron, super-editor, caught the problem. Rather than try to fix it all himself, as he was doing with other copy-edit things, he just flagged every usage and sent the manuscript back with a note recommending that I change or remove most of them. Having to go through and do it myself really opened my eyes to the problem.
I manged to remember the lesson for several books, before a new word crept in, suddenly. Suddenly, that word appeared on every page. A character might be sauntering, when suddenly… And then suddenly…
So what do you do? First, if you are a brand new author, I strongly recommend hiring a good editor for your first book. If you can find someone like Nas, who can catch tics and bring them to your attention, he or she is worth every penny you pay and then some. You probably don’t even realize that you are doing it.
Since I know that I have a tendency to repeat a word to death, I keep an eye open during the review/revise phase of writing. Most recently, I started to get a sense that “really” was appearing a little too often. Nine times in two pages is really too much, I’m sure you’ll agree. So I went up to that little box on Word and did a “Find all.” The manuscript looked as if someone had splattered egg all over it (yellow highlights). Yes, I really had a problem. I removed about half the “really”s, replaced another quarter with a different intensifier, and left the rest, so long as there were no others in close proximity.
You might not repeat words the way I do. You might fall into the Tom Swifty trap (“Run faster,” said Tom hurriedly.) You might go through a phase where you write so fast that you omit dialogue tags [guilty] and then have to figure out who said what to whom for two pages and more. You might—gasp!—overuse punctuation—no! Really? I remember one fantasy novel where it reached the point that if the heroine “played with the end of her long, soft curl” one more time, the book was going to go flying. One page later, it flew.
Does this mean your characters can’t have a repetitive action unless you are showing that they are OCD, like Monk? No. Auriga “Rigi” Bernardi giggles a great deal. But she knows this, tries not to do it, thinks adults don’t giggle, and so on. It is part of her personality that bubbles out.
Watch out for tics.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Tic, Tic, Tic – A Rerun by Alma T. C. Boykin”
Get well, soon!
Thank you. I dragged home yesterday with a numb brain and no, zero, ability to write anything new. Just like the last time I did one of these intensive classes.
If you listen to someone reading the Hardy Boys out loud (yes, we were having a LOT of fun) the “ly” problem is acute. Every single action comes with an adverb and honestly, there was a great deal of variety. But that didn’t save it from being weird. Not something I want to imitate… ; )
This is a place where some of the online digital editors shine — they can identify word reuse, and its cousin duplicated words (e.g., “the the”). The author’s eye skips right over these things (especially over a line break) – it’s a psychological blindspot, since you know what you meant to write.
I wouldn’t rely on those digital editors for much — but they’re worth adding to your toolkit just for that.
The first time I encountered it was when I was attempting to slog through the Wheel of Time series (this was back when, oh, book 7 had just come out–I’d been mostly a fan to that point, but ended up skipping book 6, reading book 7 and cringing, going BACK to book 6 to see if it had improved–it hadn’t. Then I gave up.). There were a lot of reasons I gave up, but among them were the preponderance of instances where a female character either tugged on her braid or thought about her cleavage. As a rule, in my life experience, very few if any women obsess over their cleavage save for very rare occasions–such as wearing a lower-cut top than one is used to for the first time. And many of us don’t even HAVE any cleavage to speak of, at least not without a lot of structural assitance.
Another instance was the overuse of the phrase ” paused” in the first Mistborn novel. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it had I not listened to the audio version for my first read. But because a narrator was reading it, boy did I notice. And it drove me NUTS. Loved the story, loved the world, but I still haven’t read the next two books in that series because of it, and skipped right to the Alloy of Law segment, where thankfully that phrase only showed up on occasion. (I think either Sanderson noticed, or someone brought it to his attention. In any case, he used it so rarely that it cropping up–twice so far, I think–in The Lost Metal actually caught my ear, and made me laugh. It was a sensible place to have that phrase, though.)
For myself, at least in internet commentary, I tend to WAY overuse parenthesis and ellipses. I am aware of this. For the purposes of internet commentary, I don’t care, but if/when I drag my brain back into fiction writing, I know I’ll have to watch out for it. (It’s really hard not to do in first person, lol.)
Word clouds.
Not so good for a page or two, but if you put your work into a word cloud, you know what are your favorite words.
I had fun making a few just now. Apparently my characters like to look around a lot. I should probably have them doing more stuff.
My bane is “even.”