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Thursday, July 1, 2010

Characters always LOOKING at each other

It was serendipitous timing, when Nathan Bransford posted his latest blog about writing tics, because that's something I've been thinking about a bit while working on a book revision.

Though this is a big revision, so it's more "writing book from scratch" for the most part and I'm not actively looking for my writing tics, but it made me think about what they are. And as all writers do, I have a few.

Mine are different to what I thought they were going to be though. How do I know for SURE which words are showing up in my manuscript more than others?

I created a word cloud with Wordle. Mine has a lot of LOOKED, LIKE, AROUND and BACKs in it. Yeah, okay, my characters look at each other, look at the floor, the wall, into the distance, I understand why there's a lot of LOOKing. Much of this is probably unnecessary and I'll be hacking away at it in my next pass. AROUND probably follows many of the LOOKs, but LIKE? And BACK? It'll be interesting to see what sort of context all of those BACKs and LIKEs are in.

My Word Cloud looks pretty kick ass, I just don't know how to save it to show you. Any clues?

In the meantime, back to my revisions! I'm on mid-semester break at the moment and spending it being as productive as I can. Spending most of my holiday in my writing cave keeps me out of the FREEZING cold weather outside, so I think I've made the right choice. :)

Ciao for now,

Sairz