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Thursday, March 17, 2016

My Five Favorite Words

When I write, I have to be really cognizant of how much I use my four favorite words.

  1. Really
  2. Just
  3. That
  4. Totally
  5. Actually
In case you missed it, I used really already in the first sentence of this blog post. I seriously love that word. I don't try too hard to avoid these words as I write because there are enough other things I need to worry about that are more important. What I do is while I'm revising, I'll run a search and hunt down these words.

This is the same time when I'll do a search for character's names to make sure the hero and heroine aren't addressing each other by name too often because people don't talk like that in real life. If you pay attention to conversations, especially those between two people, you'll notice that names are rarely used. I like my dialogue to be realistic, and while I do a pretty good job on the name thing, it still creeps in.

Also, each book seems to develop its own favorite word. This one I need to be aware of because it's different for each story and isn't on my list to search for until I can identify it. I'm not sure how this happens, but it does without fail.

Just one of the many reasons that revisions (and editors) are an author's best friend.