Look ma, no "look"

 So I'm back to revising mode and not exactly diving in with a lot of grace. Something is sort of... off. During my vacation from writing, I stayed up 'til 11 or 12 reading, writing blog entries, even tidying up my other manuscript a bit. I was keeping up the same schedule, but still when I started going through revisions once more on Sunday night, I only got about an hour into it before...ZONK! My head hit the computer (trust me, not good when you get a big line of j's running through your manuscript). I could barely keep my eyes open, and the same thing happened the next night, and the next. I don't know what's up with that. I'm hoping it was just the task I was doing- eliminating overuse of the word "look" was too mundane or something.  Anywho, I've decided to talk about those revisions I did over the past few days and illustrate how to decide when to keep this word and when to eliminate it.

1.When "look" is a part of the dialogue. Usually in this instance it's ok to keep the word because people use it in their speech all the time. 

An example from NW: “She looked tired when she got home last night so I didn’t get into it with her.” 
Now it would sound pretty silly for Nikki's mother to say, "She appeared tired..." because people jsut don't talk that way. Possibly she could have said "She seemed tired" but that would imply that more had gone on than her mother just glancing at her, and I didn't want to give the indication that they had interacted at all, so I just kept the looked.

2. When "look" is used to describe an action that is taking place. 
Example: I looked down at the napkin he’d been ripping, now a pile of dust. 
In this case, you can substitute looked for a more descriptive verb such as peered, glanced, gazed. Others to consider that don't work so well in this instance, but you should still keep in mind : squinted, leered, gaped, gawked, peeped, ogle, searched, watched. Or, if you don't want to substitute, you can try re-arranging the sentence or put something entirely different in its place. I did this a lot in this round of revisions because it seemed like almost every other sentence I had people looking up, looking down, looking to the side or looking away. Sometimes it's better to just eliminate these types of sentences and force yourself to find new things for your characters to do instead of always "looking". 

3. When "look" is used to describe someone or their expression. 
Example: “Yes, but Maxine…” He looked disturbed, though not as much as I felt.  
This is one instance where the word look should definitely be replaced because this is a clear instance of telling rather than showing. This is how I changed it, and I might still play with it some, but you get the idea. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” he said, twisting his hands together. He lifted his head toward the stairs. Here we get the idea that Sam may be nervous or disturbed without having to actually say it. 

In summary, I started out with 276 instances of look or looked in my manuscript, and by the time I was done I had cut that number in half, and most surprising, I didn't even increase my word count. Amazing! If you've noticed I have a little poll going on up at top, and I'd love it if you would participate. If you have any other suggestions on what I should blog about, I'd appreciate it!!

P.S. Sorry for all the goofiness with the fonts - Blogger doesn't like it when you cut and paste. Darn Blogger!!

Revision tip/s

So I was going to post a book review, but those always take me a while so I thought that I'd post a couple of quick revision tips instead.

First up is something I recently read off someone's blog and I sincerely apologize to the original poster but I can't remember who it was (I searched my dashboard and couldn't find it, so if you posted this let me know so I can give you credit). Addendum: Yay! She read my post. Here's the link to Meredith's original tip. The writer suggests that you type your story in Courier New font until it's as polished as it can be, then change everything to Times New Roman. She says that she always, always finds little errors that she missed. Well, I tried this and even though my manuscript is not done, I can tell you that it works. I think it comes from the idea that your eye is trained to see things a certain way so when you've been looking at your manuscript in a particular font for so long errors fade into the background. When you switch font, suddenly your eye picks those things up. I found so many mistakes and little errors. So now I'm training my eye in Courier and when its ready for querying I'll change it back to TNR and see what I missed. I think the trick works for any font combination, but I've kind of gotten used to courier now. A little corollary that I'd like to add to this is to view your document in double pages - full screen reading for you Word users - it makes it that much easier to see your work in full and you can pick out paragraphs that are too long, snippets of dialogue that run on without any breaks, etc. etc.

My second editing tip is searching for over used words. There are lots of them, but I'm going to focus on the word had. First of all it doesn't sound good when you have a lot of these strung together in a paragraph and second, you can often pinpoint parts that are too backstory heavy when you see three or more of these together. A quick tip is to use the find feature, type in had and then click on the 'highlight all' button. That way you can quickly flip through the pages hunting for paragraphs where had is overused (3 or more times). Now you certainly don't have to delete or reword all of them, but often times just some slight variations can make the paragraph sound better - and even help you to delete extra words. The only thing that's slightly annoying is when you go into the paragraph to make changes it removes all of the highlights so you have to re-click it. There may be a way around this but I haven't found it yet. You can do the same thing to quickly hunt for adverbs by typing in ly. Now you might say, but Angie, that will highlight so many things!! Actually if you're writing is sound then it won't, (I tried it and yes it does highlight some things besides adverbs, but not that many) and if you're an adverb junkie then that would be one way to rid yourself of the habit. My recommendation is to limit yourself to 1 maybe 2 adverbs per page.

Those are my tips for the day. If you have a quick tip you'd like to share, let me know!!

I made a quick revision to this post after reading the link that Joann provided and making a wordle picture of my manuscript. I also copied all of my words into Excel so now I'll have a working list. Thanks Joann!!