11 Key areas to improve your writing when developing and editing your manuscript.
Posted 4/23/20 | Updated 7/2/20
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Do you have the tendency to use filter words in your writing? Do you overwrite sentences to include as much detail as possible? Do you overuse clichés?
Literary agent Elizabeth Kracht observes that even really good manuscripts have weak spots that are enough to garner rejection from agents and publishers. The good news is that most of these problems are easy to fix once the writer sees and understands them.
After several years of evaluating manuscripts and noticing many submissions had similar problems, Kracht began listing the pitfalls and offers her expertise as short, easy-to-implement bites of advice in The Author's Checklist.
In this feature, Tightening and Sharpening Prose, Kracht offers pointed advice for easily avoiding bad writing habits in 11 key areas, and includes 5 decisive questions to review with your own writing.
Most of us would agree that one component of literary fiction is beautifully crafted prose in which description, word choice, sentence structure, and other elements combine to create a work that celebrates the language as much as (or arguably more than) the storyline.
Earlier I mentioned the debate around what's considered literary fiction. And though the lines of publishing may have blurred as agents and editors are seeing and acknowledging more literary-quality genre fiction, the majority of submissions that come to agents and editors are lacking the skills of even high-quality commercial writing.
We all know that great writing is more than beautiful prose: it also requires skillful plot and setting development, characterization, dialogue, and so much more. I have seen plenty of projects whose authors were truly gifted and whose sentences were stunning but whose storytelling lacked all of these other essential components. I have also seen countless projects that have these other elements of great writing in place, but whose prose itself is weighed down by bad writing habits that are easily avoided. Writing doesn't have to be beautiful to be salable, but most projects would benefit from more attention shown to the prose.
Below I give some general advice for tightening and sharpening prose.
Adverbs are modifiers of verbs or adjectives, including words like slowly, quickly, incredulously, angrily, and literally (the last is almost always misused). Many adverbs end in -ly, but not all. Some other common adverbs are very, great, good, and little (some of which are also used as adjectives).
Most editors and agents consider the use of adverbs a sign of weak prose. It's true that some bestselling authors strew adverbs throughout their work, and when you reach this status, you can do whatever you want. Until then, challenge yourself to find ways to describe the qualities of events, voices, and actions without relying on adverbs. My rule of thumb is to limit adverbs to five per manuscript. And challenge yourself to use them in unusual ways. Do a quick search of your manuscript for -ly words and rework the prose to convey what you're trying to say through characterization, dialogue, or other characters' points of view.
Clichés often come in the form of metaphors and similes, though agents see plenty of cliché characters and storylines as well. If you want to use metaphors and similes in your work, come up with unusual, unique comparisons. Common clicheé include three sheets to the wind, tough as nails, thick as thieves, and the tip of the iceberg. Look for places where you use common phrasing and rework them.
Use contractions where you can in dialogue and narrative. You don't have to use them all the time, but prose can have a stilted feel without them. As I said earlier, contractions have been around since Old English, and words like don't and can't emerged in the 1800s (or possibly earlier). In the past it has sometimes been a stylistic choice not to use them in writing, but not because people didn't speak this way.
Simple work on dialogue can transform prose. See the suggestions in the book section "Dialogue."
Readers experience any story through a character's or narrator's point of view. When you add filter words — verbs that explicitly narrate the characters' experiences — they intrude into the reader's experience of the novel's world, reducing the sense of immediacy.
Examples of filter words include these:
He could feel the energy disappear from the room.
She saw her life play out in front of her.
He heard the baby wailing in the next room.
Rewritten without filter words, these sentences gain immediacy, tension, and action:
The energy disappeared from the room.
Her life played out in front of her.
The baby wailed in the next room.
The following is a brief list of filter words, but a quick online search will suggest many more. Although using filter words may sometimes be the best choice, look for all forms of these verbs in your manuscript and eliminate them where possible to strengthen your prose:
assumed
believed
can/could
decided
experienced
feel/felt
hear/heard
know/knew
looked
noted
noticed
realized
remembered
sounded
think/thought
watched
wondered
Overwriting can occur when the author tries to include too much description in each sentence or needs more skill in handling complex sentence structure. One author I worked with was so focused on the minute movements of the character — down to subtle arm movements — that I not only had to slow down while reading to try and understand the movements being described, but also lost track of the bigger picture of what was happening. If you've been told that you overwrite, focus more on the heart of what's happening in the scene and lean toward less description, fewer adjectives, and shorter sentences. It should not take a character three pages to cross a room.
Qualifiers and intensifiers are types of modifiers: words or phrases added to another word to modify the meaning. Many writers tend to overuse qualifiers and intensifiers, particularly qualifiers that indicate uncertainty. Qualifying an assertion can be important in academic or research writing, where information and conclusions are subject to discussion and evaluation, but in fiction qualifiers usually weaken your sentences and characters. Characters who exhibit too much uncertainty can become unsympathetic (see "Characterization").
When I'm editing and see instances of qualifiers indicating a character's uncertainty, I ask myself, "Is there a reason this character can't know this for certain?" For example, does the woman seem to be pissed off, or can she just be pissed off? Will it hurt the narrative if the character is certain about what they are seeing or experiencing? Here are six examples.
Removing the qualifiers makes these sentences more active and alive.
Another pet peeve of many agents and editors is the overuse of intensifiers (usually adverbs; see above), which are meant to strengthen the meaning of words but can often weaken it instead. Intensifiers work against the quality of writing because they can overamplify the voice of a project, making it too dramatic. In addition, they often don't add anything, and thus they are often perceived as lazy writing.
The list of modifiers is long. Search your manuscript for these overused qualifiers and intensifiers, and eliminate as many as you can to create more powerful sentences and characters:
almost
a lot
apparently
appeared to be, to have
been
barely
completely
definitely
good
great
just
kind of
literally
little
many
may be, have been
maybe
might be, have been
perhaps
pretty
probably
quite
rather
really
seemed to be, to have been
seemingly
so
somewhat
sort of
too
unknowingly
very
The meme 45 Ways to Avoid Using the Word 'Very' from Writers Write gives a list of more powerful words to use instead. And there's a piece of classic advice often attributed to Mark Twain: "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
There are four types of sentence structure: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. Engaging prose generally uses a mix. Simple sentences lend a sense of pace, whereas compound-complex sentences may give the reader a break from a fast pace or explore nuances and themes. If you gravitate toward one sentence style, try and mix it up. Some authors find it challenging to write compound-complex sentences without getting lost in their syntax. When I run across shaky use of this style, I suggest authors simplify and shorten their sentences. Learning about the different types of sentences is not hard. Once you understand their conventions, you can employ them for different effects in your writing. The New York Times bestseller How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish is a short and interesting read on the art of composing fine sentences.
In addition to the four main sentence styles, there are nonsentences: sentence fragments or incomplete sentences. Be careful about overusing these. Though many famous authors have used (and use) fragments, their use should enhance the style and voice, not make the work feel thin and clipped.
Be careful of jumping verb tenses. Familiarize yourself with tenses so you understand the boundaries of what works.
Sometimes the writing in a manuscript is technically okay, but it just doesn't spark; it's flat. Many of the suggestions in this section recommend tightening prose through eliminating weak and unnecessary words. But when it comes to sharpening prose, we turn to word choice. The best advice I can give is to read poetry. Poets are masters at expressing perceptions and emotions and evoking tone with a minimal number of words. Practice this. Challenge yourself to improve each sentence and line of your work. The reader isn't looking for pretension or big words plucked from a thesaurus but rather for unusual, vivid expression that fits the context and characters. Stop and read poems posted on social media. Read a book of poetry a month.
Take advantage of online tools like Wordle.net, analytical software, your beta readers, or a copy editor to identify words you overuse so you can trim them back. One of the most common, unnecessary words I see is that. Others include qualifiers like perhaps, maybe, and apparently (see above). My author Tj Turner has a list of words he scans his manuscript for after each revision. According to Tj, "The words on my list attract me to where I need to spend more time. They're flags for bad writing."
His list came in handy when he needed to significantly cut the word count for his book Angel in the Fog. By seeking out one problem word on his list, he is often able to remove six or seven by tightening the sentences where it appears. This is a partial version of Tj's list, which you'll notice has many filter words (see above).
become, became
can, could (she could, she couldn't)
decided
feel (or feel like), felt
glanced
hear, heard
looked
noticed
realized
see, saw
seemed
smelled
sounded
tasted
think, thought
touched
turned
watched
wished
wondered
Have you combed through your manuscript to delete all unnecessary filter words and remove qualifiers of uncertainty?
Have you made a list of words you tend to overuse?
Do you know what sentence style you lean toward?
Have you revised your manuscript to vary your style?
Have you done a line-by-line edit to improve word choice?
Excerpted from The Author's Checklist: An Agent's Guide to Developing and Editing Your Manuscript Copyright ©2020 by Elizabeth K. Kracht. Reprinted from Permission from New World Library. www.NewWorldLibrary.com.
Elizabeth K. Kracht, author of The Author's Checklist is a literary agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates and a freelance editor. She often participates in writers' conferences nationally and internationally and lives in Tiburon, California. More information at www.elizabethkracht.com.