That Sounds Familiar: Eliminating Often-Used Words in Our Writing

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

It takes a lot of work to write well, and sometimes we go for what's easiest instead of what's original. Here's a heavily revised look at word packages.

During the drafting stage of a manuscript, some phrases and combinations of words tend to roll off our fingers and into our stories. Theses phrases aren’t clichés, per se, but they’ve been used so often by enough writers that they carry the same feeling as a cliché when readers read them.

They also tend to sound “right” to us, and that's the problem. We automatically use them without thinking about it, and that robs us of the chance to write something unique to our voice and style.

For example, I don’t know where the term “sodium lights” came from, I just know that I’d never heard of them, and then "The orange glow from the sodium lights” was in about half the novel I read for a while (published and critiqued). Even to this day, that phrase jumps out at me when I see it.

Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com