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A good article to listen to. Thanks!

It's best to look at that list AFTER the first draft. The same thing was happening to me. So, rather than be paralyzed by fear, I wrote from the heart. It IS an excellent guideline while editing, however.

I totally agree with you, JP!

If you get so bogged down with trying to avoid certain words, you never get your novel started!

But we all have lists of words we over use and should keep an eye out for them while editing. My personal bane is "come". I will use it everywhere, especially dialogue. When first editing the Beast of Caer Baddan a couple of years ago, I deleted over a hundred extraneous "come"s! And that was after I had take a whole bunch out already!

However, we have to be careful about cutting words that are actually needed. Certain words change the meaning of a sentence, so if you take them out, you can confuse the readers and given an incorrect picture of the events. If a character says to another, "Sit." it is rude, as if he(she) is treating another person like a dog. We do not talk to other people that way. Even if it is prefaced with "Please". "Please sit," is still incorrect. The character speaking would be immediately categorized as a bully (for "sit") or a social ignoramus (for "please sit"). Probably not what we were after. We say "Sit down," to people, even if it is an order, and thus so should our characters.

Also, one man's cures is another's blessing. He says to take out "then" and replace with "and", yet I have read a lot of novels that are filled to over capacity with "and"s. It would be a disservice to those writers to be advised to remove one of their few "then"s in place of an over used "and".

We have to be very careful about giving advice.

Great article and comments.

My first "check" is before I post a chapter to TNBW, but like others have mentioned, I also try not to focus on things like this while I'm writing. I also read the article as not necessarily saying to delete all these words and never use them, but if you do, to do so sparingly.

Thanks for sharing Janet - I've recognised a few words I tend to use too much.

Share?

Oddly enough, I do my best writing when I'm on the verge of exhaustion and pumped full of sugar and/or caffeine. Also, I must have music and it must be loud.

I completely agree. I'll avoid certain words just a little bit when I'm writing, but it's when I reach the editing stage that I rummage through and hack at all those pesky 'had's and 'that's.

That depends on what you mean to accomplish by doing it.

Drunk on Peach Schnapps? There's either a book title or a very sad disorder in that. I'm not sure which? 

Stand up for Whisky, Vodka, Beer, a nice Cabernet Sauvignon or Riesling.  Peach Schnapps is a poodle in the wolf pack, surely? No worse a writer than a fruity-breathed drunkard. It could turn out very badly, ending up in poetry.

My point was not to include or exclude dialogue. It was to show the importance of seemingly worthless words.

I have had to tell authors to insert "that" in certain places in sentences in the narration because the meaning was obscured  by lack of the "extra" word. In many of these cases the author had originally included the missing "that" but then removed it on advice of another person who was hell bent on cutting "that"s.

I'm not trying to make an exception of dialogue, but to show the need for us  think about what we deem expendable.

Oooh. Poetry. Ick. I'll turn it into a fuzzy navel. Husband says I'm a cheap date, so... I'll start pouring.

Listening to advice like this is the best way to generify ones work. The use of any given word depends on style. Arbitrarily demonizing this or that word and sentencing them to genocide is the work of a robot, not a writer.

Thanks, Rebecca. I can see your issue, now. I guess we each have our own demons to expunge.

Perhaps no meaning is lost, but unless your writing is set in some other time and place where everyone talks like a drunk barb, what you have substituted is not all natural speech and it will surely sound out of place to the reader; at least to this one. There are no concrete rules for writing and if you impose such on yourself, well, then you're going to have pretty stiff dialogue imho. Take care. Vern

Edited for PS: Just one other teensy tidbit: You can't "laugh" conversation. You can laugh at it or with it, and you can even try to laugh at the same time, but you can't (cannot if you prefer) laugh the dialogue itself. Of course that is not set in concrete as a rule either since you can write anything you wish and keep those commas instead of periods, technically correct or not. Just a thought.