This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
You can listen to Anna’s podcasted novel over on her website www.annabellwrites.com and follow her on twitter @annabell_writes
There seems to a be a fine line for me when reading novels between getting to know the quirks of a character and repetition of an author. Have you ever read a book where one little buzz word of the main character or an action they do drive you potty as they do it over and over again? Or is that just me?!
I like it when I get to know a character in a novel, and when you read the words you can really imagine how they’d speak, but every so often authors can over do it, and it drives me bonkers. Now you’d think because this is one of my pet hates that I would be well and truly honed on to this, and I would hear alarm bells in my head if I did such writing, but I am just as guilty.
The problem I think, comes from writing a book over a series of months, and especially if you’re an aspiring author who works as well, you’re not writing your book 24/7. Which means you don’t see the repetitions creep in as much as you might if you were writing over a short space in time.
When I recently reedited my first novel I noticed a lot of this kind of repetition. Kate my main character bit her lip a lot, so much in fact that she would have had lips as plump as Angelina Jolie. She also trundled off for cocktails and generally trundled out of scenes. I don’t think in real life I’ve known anyone to ‘trundle’ anywhere.
I hadn’t picked these up in my first edit of the novel which I did relatively quickly after completing it. These howlers appeared after my manuscript had gathered dust for just over a year. Leaving it meant I was able to reread it with fresher eyes and the mistakes jumped out at me.
I’ve since learnt to be a lot hotter on phrases or words I think I’ve used a lot; I’ve then done find and replace using the word ‘dinosaur’ (a word I hopefully haven’t used in my novel) and then that way Word tells me how many times I’ve used it. I then change it back to the original word and set about fixing the repetition, which means actually using a thesaurus and not being quite so word lazy. It is amazing how many ways I can describe my characters going in search of cocktails without any trundling taking place.