Blog Chain

It's time for the blog chain again and this time Christine asks:

What are your "go-to" scenes or phrases? You know, the ones you have to remind yourself NOT to use too frequently? What do you do to keep yourself from being overly reliant on them?

Okay so, I just can't believe Christine thinks I might actually repeat words or phrases. I mean, seriously? I just don't like, write like that. Okay, I mean come on. Seriously.

Ha! Okay, no actually it's embarrassing how often I use the same words and phrases. For my last manuscript, I was fortunate enough to be mentored by the amazing Ellen Hopkins as part of the Nevada SCBWI Mentorship Program. She helped me so much, but it was kind of humiliating how many repeats she pointed out. In dialogue, I use okay, just, come on, really, actually, seriously, like, and I'm sorry way too much. In that story I used dark, freak, zombie, glisten, rush, and unfurl too much.

I'm always writing about character's eyes. So many eyes.

And in this last story my main character dropped too many beverages. And the love interest asked if she was okay too many hundreds of times. (But she was so not okay!)

I always think by reading the manuscript out loud, I'll find these things. I do, but clearly not enough. Scrivener has a great feature where it ranks the order of which words appear most frequently in the document. I should use this feature more often.

What about you? Which words sneak themselves onto every page?

Check out Michelle's and Cole's take on the topic.