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Crosspost from LJ: Word abuse
Nov. 4th, 2008 05:59 pmI think my NaNoWriMo novel is generally going okay. yWriter tells me I'm at 13,484 words now, well ahead of where I have to be for day four. I'm trying to build up a big lead so I can concentrate on studying for the next couple of weeks -- I have an important International Studies exam on the nineteenth, and I don't want to have understudied for that in favour of meeting my daily word goals. So, building up the huge lead now. Fun.
The main reason I got irritated enough to write an entry is because I realised I overuse the word "well". To start lines of dialogue, that is. Seemingly everyone's favourite word to lead off a sentence is "well". "Well, okay then." "Well, but you don't want to do that, right?" "Well, he's kind of an idiot anyway." (Those sentences are all paraphrased, by the way. I'm trying to edit out the unnecessary "well"s where I see them.)
It's not that I'm deliberately trying to overuse this word. And I know the obvious answer is that, if I don't want these words, maybe I just shouldn't write them. But when I'm trying to write naturalistic dialogue (which is pretty much my whole novel so far -- I might as well have written a script!), I'm not concentrating on each individual word. I'm concentrating on the flow of the sentence, on how a "real person" might say what I'm trying to get across. And apparently, I think that "real people" are completely obsessed with the word "well".
Ugh.
The main reason I got irritated enough to write an entry is because I realised I overuse the word "well". To start lines of dialogue, that is. Seemingly everyone's favourite word to lead off a sentence is "well". "Well, okay then." "Well, but you don't want to do that, right?" "Well, he's kind of an idiot anyway." (Those sentences are all paraphrased, by the way. I'm trying to edit out the unnecessary "well"s where I see them.)
It's not that I'm deliberately trying to overuse this word. And I know the obvious answer is that, if I don't want these words, maybe I just shouldn't write them. But when I'm trying to write naturalistic dialogue (which is pretty much my whole novel so far -- I might as well have written a script!), I'm not concentrating on each individual word. I'm concentrating on the flow of the sentence, on how a "real person" might say what I'm trying to get across. And apparently, I think that "real people" are completely obsessed with the word "well".
Ugh.