On this blog every Tuesday and Friday I write about story techniques, structure, and/or publishing. Comments and questions are welcome. I also have a personal blog, Amy Deardon, on which I write about a variety of topics purely as they catch my fancy.

I've written one novel, A Lever Long Enough, that I'm honored to say has won two awards. In my life BC (before children) I was a scientist who did bench research.

My book, The Story Template: Conquer Writer's Block Using the Universal Structure of Story, is now available in both hard-copy and e-book formats. I also coach would-be novelists and screenwriters to develop their story. YOU CAN CONTACT ME at amydeardon at yahoo dot com.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Word Tics



No matter how much you don't want to do this, almost certainly in your manuscript you have included word tics. These little buggers are simply words that you overuse, your list of personal cliches that make sense to you but will start to grate on a reader if used too often. For example, in my first manuscript I found that my characters kept "murmuring" to each other.

I found a website that counts the incidence of words in a passage and lists them from most to least common. "The" and "and" appear, of course (although you can specify not to search for little words), but then you'll find the specific words used in your writing.

Great tool! http://www.wordcounter.com/

1 comment:

  1. Excellent resource, Amy. You must be quite the web searcher!

    ReplyDelete