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Guest Post: Eradicating the stink bugs of prose by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Please welcome back Andrew Welsh-Huggins to our blog …

Eradicating the stink bugs of prose

          As someone who prides himself on being fairly well read, attune to the finer points of the craft of writing, and having a decent vocabulary, I was mortified to realize recently, on finishing the draft of a novel, that a summary of my hero’s movements boiled down to this: “I glanced over, nodded, shrugged, gazed, and turned.”

          Despite all my best efforts, overused words cropped up again and again, creeping down the curtain of my prose like stink bugs, those ubiquitous shield-shaped insects that have seemingly permeated everyone’s house in the continental United States. Unlike those bugs, a couple of “he nodded’s” are tolerable, because people nod in real life, just as they “glance at” an interesting person, “turn to leave a room,” and even make assumptions “based on the” information at hand. They just shouldn’t do it, as fictional characters, on every page or in every chapter.

          But how to fix this problem? How to keep stink bug words to a minimum, especially over the course of a story or a book? Naturally there’s an app for that, or in this case, software programs such as Scrivener and Grammarly that help tackle the problem for you. There is something to be said for enlisting technology to aid your writing, just as there is a time and a place to throw up your hands and call the exterminator. But for me, these programs don’t reach the heart of the dilemma, which is committing the sin—OK, the foible—in the first place.

          Let’s be realistic: it may be impossible to completely eliminate overused words and phrases, just as it’s impossible to rid your house of those offending insects altogether. But on reflection, I’ve developed a few techniques for reducing their prevalence (the words, not the bugs) in my copy.

_ First, know your enemy. Decide what words you want to avoid up front. Begin with low-hanging fruit, such as the chronic overuse of “get” and “put,” crutch words which can almost always be substituted with something stronger. “Had” is another culprit, as in, “He had ridden his bike to the shop that morning,” instead of simply, “He rode his bike . . . ” Marvin Kaye, fiction editor of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, goes so far as to remove unnecessary “had’s” in stories, as he explains on his submission page:“Boiled down, here is what’s wrong with some (not all) compound past tenses—except for fiction written in present tense, our convention is to put things in the simple past.” From there, identify other frequent flyers. For me, they include characters who continually “start to” do something—whether walk, leave, interrupt, or in the worst example, shoot—and the aforementioned overuse of actions like nod, shrug, glance, gaze, and turn.

_ Next, having compiled a naughty vocabulary list, try to avoid these words to begin with. Take your time and write in the moment, focusing on the selection and value of every word. When you catch a characterspying someone or something, consider another word choice on the spot. Sometimes you’ll decide it’s the right word after all. More often than not, a different, better option is available. The goal is making the decision as you write, not revise.

_ Finally, because repetition—like stink bugs—often resists efforts at eradication, enlist technology after all. Consider the technique followed by historical mystery novelist Nancy Herriman, for whom words describing emotions or movement, such as ‘peer’ or ‘walk’, are her particular bane:

          First, as I write my initial draft, I keep a running list of words I sense I'm overusing. At the end of a section or a chapter, I do a simple search for those words and rewrite the sentence (or eliminate it completely, if possible). The next step occurs once the entire manuscript is complete and I'm rereading the book while editing. Quite often I discover I’ve substituted a whole new set of overused words for a prior set of favorites. Which requires me to start the search-and-destroy process all over again!

          Still, you may not catch every recurrence of an overused word, as anyone who’s dealt with six-legged members of the Pentatomidae family can attest. And as I suggested earlier, not every instance of them must go. Sometimes, there’s only a single way for one character to end a conversation with another, and that’s to turn away. The important thing is to avoid excessive appearances of such words so at the conclusion of a scene it’s your characters, and not your readers, who are turning away.

Andrew Welsh-Huggins ©2019

Writer, reader, owner of too many pets. AP News Guy, author of the Andy Hayes private eye mystery series, and editor, Columbus Noir, upcoming from Akashic Books.

Online: https://andrewwelshhuggins.com/

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Twitter: @awhcolumbus