Tagged: weasel word

Sweating the Small Stuff

r-avatarWes Anderson says details are what the world is made of, and his logic is difficult to dispute. They’re certainly the constituent particles of a story, and also of the manuscript that conveys it. Subtle changes of phrasing have a strong impact on the flavor and fluidity of prose. Little things matter.

Consider:

It was clear that no one else knew the secret.

As opposed to…

It was clear no one else knew the secret.

Or, more to Ernest’s liking:

No one else knew.

Which one is best? The only honest answer to that is the unhelpful “it depends,” but a reliable guideline is to use the fewest words that support the message. Arguably, that something’s clear can go unstated. So, the first two drafts might be burdened with superfluous observation. But the ultra-terse third variant might throw readers for a POV loop because it feels like direct thought. Cultivate a strong sense of the style and voice you’re working in, and pick your cuts accordingly.

When it’s time to stomp the weasels, you’re faced with such choices over and over. Every sentence could potentially be a different sentence. In fact, many alternate selves haunt each one. And these are important choices.

How you tell it is every bit as important as the tale. Stomping weasels with a partner will show you whether you’re in sync about the how of your storytelling. You’ll be lulled into thinking the process is purely mechanical, but certain blatantly extraneous words will be sacrosanct in your partner’s sight. And your partner will blithely suggest trimming your favorite verbiage.

Don’t be too eager to appease each other when these disputes arise. Talk them through, and read the passages aloud. These snags are clues to the nuances of how we each interpret language, and exploring them will help you converge on a voice that truly reflects you both.

Reinventing The Wheel

r-avatarOur process is now firmly established and fairly predictable. But every book is different. And when you forget, they remind you. Just when you think you know what to expect, it’s back to the drawing board.

The later stages of revision, for us, include deweaseling and line editing. Both are fine-grained views of the text, and we’ve discussed the possibility of combining them so we can save ourselves one whole pass through the manuscript. So far, at least, we feel it’s worth the additional time to do it in two passes because they’re really not all that similar, mentally. It’s beneficial to look at every sentence several times, in different lighting.

When we went through this process with the Music Novel we trimmed out a significant percentage of the words. Now, we’re going through it with the Science Novel and finding that those results are inapplicable. There are fewer weasel words in it to begin with, apparently. The line editing is also much more challenging, and it’s leading to more… negotiations than last time.

All authors see changes in their style over time. More practice should mean cleaner, crisper writing at each stage. When two people write together, their combined experience is reflected in the manuscript. What Kent and Jen have found is that they can each now “do the voice” whereas in the early days they had to go over each other’s work to bring it into line. Interesting that this maturation seems to be leading to new difficulties during revision.

Overall, though, it’s a huge win. We might be finding issues in our workflow that weren’t there before, but we’re also getting from concept to completed draft to polished manuscript with much less effort and in far fewer iterations. Working well as a team has a lot to do with that.

Scalpels and Machetes

r-avatarBreak out the champagne! We finished our edits on the music novel! Through the enthusiastic use of Weasel-Stomping Boots™ and a take-no-prisoners approach to line editing, we removed almost 17,000 words from our draft.

We mentioned in the past that one reason the word count on this novel is so high is the inclusion of copious side matter. I think the best way to describe the outcome is to say that we have a 150,000 word novel with a 20,000 word novella smeared along the bottom margin.

Jen began the line edits with a scalpel, razoring away a word here, a word there, aiming to remove just ten words per page. As she moved into sections of the manuscript that needed more work, Kent joined her and they broke out their machetes. The carnage was glorious to behold, many darlings were slaughtered, and the end result is much crisper and livelier prose. A writing partner makes the process faster and more bearable.

The official second draft has begun its journey through our critique group, and so far they like it. That means all the hard work was worth it. By removing the problems we know about, we clear away the clutter and allow our critiquers to see any deeper issues we haven’t noticed.

Stomp!

r-avatarIt was tedious and time-consuming, but last night we finally finished stomping the weasels in the music novel. Weasel words are useless little things that take up space and bloat a manuscript while adding no nutritional value. Words like “that” and “had” and “then.” Removing them is sort of like combing out nits. Kent and Jen sit together at one desk, sharing a single monitor, and make monkey noises at the text. We look at every single instance of each trouble word and debate its merits.

Often no discussion is necessary. Kent and Jen agree that a particular “just” stays or goes. Other times there is dissension and a heated debate develops. So far we have not needed the intervention of an impartial arbitrator, but we have come close.

The de-weaseling process is one a solo author can go through, but a writing partner makes it much more efficient. Of course when you’re working on your own you won’t get into any arguments, which we will admit has its appeal. When you work with a coauthor, though, you cover for each other. There will be work sessions when one or the other of you isn’t feeling particularly ruthless. That’s when your collaborator takes the lead, leaving the weasels no safe harbor. Your manuscript will thank you.

Through the judicious use of weasel-stomping boots, we removed 652 instances of “that,” and 468 of “had.” All told, we cut over 5000 garbage words from our prose. It’s leaner and meaner now, and that much closer to publishable.

Granularity

r-avatarWe completed the read-through on the music novel, and we also took care of all the minor notes we came up with along the way. Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite game: stomp the weasels! The object is to make sure we’re not overusing the words we have learned that we have a tendency to overuse. We have a list of about three dozen(!) words, which are symptomatic of passive voice, wishy-washiness, and general wordiness.

Scrivener, our writing tool of choice, has some very nifty search capabilities that are making us more productive this time around. In the past, we’ve literally color-coded our entire text by doing find/paste, which is as tedious as it sounds. Scrivener saves us that hassle. For example, we can use its regex feature to quickly highlight all the -ly words, and with just a few tweaks to the regular expression we can tell it to omit things like “jelly” or “only”. We love it!

This is an interesting phase of our process, because it’s pretty much the only time when we work off the same monitor. Rather than splitting it up and each of us de-weaseling half of the book, we look at it together and discuss which instances of “that” should be removed. Sometimes it’s not as simple as keep/kill a particular word; sometimes we find whole sentences that can come out or need to be reworded. The level of magnification at this stage is much greater than on the read-through, so it calls our attention to different aspects of the text.

We’re still in the early part of this (very large) manuscript, but so far we’re quite happy to see that we have fewer weasels lurking on each page than with our earlier efforts. On the other hand, we were sort of counting on making a meaningful dent in the word count in the course of culling those weasels, which it seems might not really happen. But it is giving us an even tighter, leaner book. There are fewer weasels, but still too many. Fortunately we have our special boots for this very job.

Weasel Stomping Boots

We all have our particular words that we tend to overuse. When writing in tandem with a partner, the weasel-word list can be twice as large.

In our partnership we have a system for keeping this issue under control. We have an actual list to work from and we use the software’s find function to track them down. Here’s the clever bit: we color-code them throughout the text so they jump out. That way we can skim through the manuscript watching for clumps. This is something we do together in real-time, so we can discuss whether to keep or stomp each weasel as we go. It would probably work out all right to divvy up the work, but we like the double-team approach for this particular aspect of the revision process.

Most of our weasels are qualifiers — almost, just, seem, appear, etc. — but we also use our color-coding technique to help us spot passive voice and repetitive sentence structures. It’s a great way of prompting yourself to really see how you’re using words, encouraging an analytical reading mode rather than getting drawn into your own story or glazing over because it’s all so familiar.

In our writing, and in work we review for our critique group, we have noticed a tendency to adopt pet words. These pets are generally not weasels (because who would want a pet weasel?), just regular words that get stuck in the writer’s head for whatever reason, and wind up on the page an inordinate number of times in a passage. BTW – “inordinate” was a pet word we encountered at one time.

With a writing partner, you have two sets of fingers creating the pet words, but you also have two sets of eyes and ears looking out for them. For us, that’s a beneficial trade-off.

What herd of weasels do you have to wrangle? How do you go after them?

Minutiae

We’re getting down to the bitter end with our edits on the third book in the trilogy. We’ve done all the big things like deleting scenes and resequencing chapters. Characters that only had one or two point-of-view scenes now find themselves with none, relegated to the background like a mere extra in a movie. Descriptions have been expanded, motivations clarified, plot points strengthened, dialog perfected. The ending has tripled in size (Now with moar happenings!).

What is left?! I hear you cry.

Weasel words, that’s what’s left.

What are weasel words? You cry yet again.

Weasel words are meaningless little words that clutter up your prose. Every author has certain crutch words that pop up, seemingly while you’re not looking, like dandelions. In our case these crutches are mainly qualifying words. Given free rein, our sentences would all look like this:

Apparently he actually perhaps might have just wanted to.

And so we use the Find function of our word processor to search out these evil little weasels and banish them.* We talk about every single one. Yes, it’s tedious, but when we’re done the prose is much snappier. It sparkles like morning dew.

What does any of this have to do with collaboration?! I hear you cry one final time.

Well, until you have a half-hour-long argument over whether or not a particular sentence needs “had” to truly connote when in time and space the action occurred in relation to the currently happening story actions, you can’t truly call yourself a co-author.

* This technique also works well for ferreting out passive voice. Color all instances of “was” red, and, when you’re done crying, your novel will thank you.