Monday 9 December 2013

Pretty Peacocks

I love Chuck Wendig's blog so much that one day I will actually get around to buying his books. He has so many good things to say about the craft and process of writing (and other stuff) expressed with, um, vigour. I've occasionally had comments on my food blog about the fact that I shouldn't swear, so fuck knows what his commenters say to him.

Anyway, in a brilliant post about editing, he made a very important point - "I keep a list of crutch words and precious darlings: anything I tend to rely upon as a lazy construction or word choice or character traits, or, or, or."

I think this should be more widely used. Because at some point the fact that a writer has used the word "delicate" or "delicately" three times on one page, exceeded only by the number of times she has used the word "gasped", is going to hit the reader with a brick and ruin their buzz. Thesaurus. Get one.

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