I have a really busy day tomorrow, so you're getting my journal a half day early.

Last week I talked a little about the trend in writing workshops (not to be confused with a trend by actual editors) of editing out all the "unnecessary" words in your story. I used the example of "the very beautiful vase gave off a dull sheen in the evening sun" being shortened all the way down to "vase shone." (for those that didn't read the journal last week, know that I disagree with that type of editing.)

A more accurate way to express what should be done: Remove all disfluencies from your writing. What's a disfluency? It's a word or syllable that takes up space but has no real meaning to the story. Someone hearing this definition and not bothering to actually THINK about what it says probably led to the crazy idea of removing all articles like "a," "an," and "the." The reason you don't edit out articles is simple: they do serve a purpose. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on why you shouldn't remove them. I'm pretty sure if you're reading this, you either 1. Haven't heard this lunacy or 2. Already know that it's not a good suggestion. But here's a quick example from earlier in my journal. "It's a word or syllable that takes up space..." becomes "It's word or syllable takes up space..." No one talks that way.

But you probably do use words that're completely unnecessary: words that break up the flow as someone is reading your story. I'll give a couple examples. The first one was one of my most frequently used mistakes--the word "that." The second big one for me was not using contractions properly. Those two edits removed almost 25 pages of Wolf's Pawn. Folks, that's about 10% of the volume.

It's pretty easy to see where you want to remove the word "that" or other words like it. If you pull the word out and it still makes complete sense and doesn't change the emphasis of the sentence, then the word goes. "I see that the people are having trouble bringing the water up from the river." This one has a few possibilities. You can remove the third and/or the fourth word, depending on your style. "I see the people..." versus "I see that people..." or even "I see people..." You don't need both and you'll find that removing excess words like that helps your story flow. I'd edit the whole sentence to read: "I see people are having trouble bringing water up from the river."

On to contractions. I've covered those before. In English, people use them a lot without even thinking and because of that, it can make your writing seem stinted and strained if you're not using them. It becomes very important in dialogue, but it also affects your descriptive text. Like I've mentioned before, if you can italicize the second word, then it can stay. "I can't" versus "I can not" versus "I can not." The emphasis isn't required if you're going to keep it, instead it just gives you an idea if it'll flow correctly.

There is one other time when you want to spell out two words instead of contracting them. If there's more than say, three or so, contractions in your normal length sentence, you might want to see which ones can spell out the best. Like a lot of the guidelines I propose, this one can be overdone. Chances are good, you're not using contractions often enough, but they can be overused as well.

Another word to watch carefully is the word "had." Again, if eliminating it changes nothing, then eliminate it, but also consider changing your verb form to remove it. "I had a flower" versus "I lost a flower." Had is one of those words that's usually fine, but can be easily over-used as well.

And of course, none of this is required in dialogue. People add disfluencies all the time when they speak, such as "like," "um," er," and f-bombs. But if the characters aren't using a specific speech pattern, you can and should remove excess words so things are smooth for the reader.

Thanks for listening. If you have any topics you want covered, let me know in the comments. Next week, I'll talk about using multiple references for your character. That's one that I see a lot of writer's (including some published ones) struggle with. It's not hard; you just need to be aware of the issue.