Top Words To Cut From Your Novel // Quick Way To Improve Your Prose

hi guys my name is Jess Mena and welcome back to my channel today I want to talk to you guys about the top words you can cut right now from your novel this is definitely a step that you need to take further on in your novel don't do this right after you finish your first job because at that stage things might still change you might completely take out scenes you might have to completely rewrite chapters and so doing it at that stage doesn't really make sense because the changes that you make will be redundant so the latest you can do this in the process of drafting so at a later dropped but better but having said that here are my top words you can cut right now from your novel my first choice would be the yes/no words shouldn't have characters answer questions with one-word answers and it's even worse if those words are just yes or no there are better ways to convey a positive reaction or a negative reaction by describing the actions of the character or because an introspective thing you know the the emotions what's going on in their head but if one of the character is asking you know are you okay and the other character says yes but they actually mean no and you convey that through their emotions or through their actions that's okay however filter through your novel and find all of the guests of knows and see if it really makes sense in general as much more idea to replace the ESM know with something else with proper sentence with a proper response that still conveys that message because that's just so much more interesting than just saying yes and no next are the dreaded filter words if you don't know what filter words are these are the words that kind of filter the perspective of the character so words like thought knew decided realized heard saw things like that most of the time you don't need to actually say this creates distance from the character to the reader and so instead of saying he saw the door closing you could just say the door closed or even worse you know he thought that this was true it's much better to just say this was true because you're in the characters perspective and so anyway you can shorten that distance between the character and the reader is generally a good idea to do so and filter words are one of the first things that you should look at so search for these your document see where they appear see if they're necessary most of the time they're not and you can just replace them you know with the actual action I'll provide a link in description with a list of more filter words because they're more than just the ones I've mentioned briefly here the third category is unnecessary adverbs or the Li adverbs they're not just a lie adverse but things that we use in normal speech to emphasize what we're saying so very just actually really anyway basically literally these words most of time and storytelling are not necessary and they will take you as a amateur writer unfortunately is if you have to say something was very bad instead of just saying something was bad or even better showing us that something is bad there's always a much better way to say it or show it than to use these adverbs and so in general we know that AB groups tend to be bad that's not always true adverbs can be very impactful but only if they're used sparingly and then they will have the impact that you want them to have for these emphasis kind of words you can just cut them straight out and the sentence should still make sense next is the dreaded was or to be or passive voice when I draft I definitely rely heavily on was fun was structures this is fine in drafting but it doesn't make for very compelling writing so when you edit you should really make a search for all of the instances where you used was or is one of the main reasons we want to replace was with an active verb is this difference between active and passive voice passive voice would be the man was bitten by a dog but if you change that into active voices the dog bit the man so we stripped out that was and replace it with an active verb instead and that sentence now has a lot more impact and it's also active voice instead of passive voice the more interesting verbs you can find to replace was usually the better though though super crazy and use a thesaurus to replace all of the verbs to do something crazy but in general you want to be as specific to the action as possible instead of just saying was in the same vein of trying to be specific rather than unspecific is to check out all of the unspecific words that you might use like something someone anything anyone everything some health these are very broad words that don't actually mean anything specific so you should always be as specific as you can so instead of saying something try to find an interesting object or whatever it is in your sentence that would make it a more interesting sentence now the next category is simple because in most cases you can get away with just deleting these words straight up you don't have to replace the one I think and these words are up-and-down so what I mean by this is we usually use these words in conjunction with standing up sitting down because you usually use those in that specific context so we know that if someone is standing they're standing up we don't need to specify the word up and the same vein if someone is sitting we know that they're sitting down on a chair we don't need to specify it always trust your reader they can figure out these nuances even though they're it's not really in nuance it's just common sense right so you can straight up delete these ups and downs as long as they're in that construction and the symptoms should still make perfect sense the next category is sequence of events type of words so what I mean by this is start to begin suddenly finally then we tend to use these before in action a lot of times they're simply not necessary a very good example is suddenly people send to you suddenly when they want to show a sudden unexpected thing that is happening but by joining the sentence suddenly it actually has the opposite effect because it's not sudden anymore do you see my point if you say suddenly this happened it makes the unexpected thing redundant because you already said suddenly and the reader already expects that's something unexpected something sudden will happen so as much about it's just bleep ease and let the actions speak for themselves you know Sam what started began then we try to describe a sequence of events and we say you know the character of this then they spend they did this we don't really need to know that that was the order you can just replace it with and most of the time or split it up into a few sentences or just generally don't string so many sequences of events together because that's not really fun to read next word is that search for this word read the sentence try to read it without that in and most of the time you will find that it will still make perfect sense even when you take that out and the last category Awards that I want to talk about is personal repetitive words as a writer you tend to notice eventually that you overuse certain words and we all have our own personal repetitions I'll just give you some examples of my personal or repetitive words that I had to cut out as much as possible because I searched for them and I realized how I use these a lot so things like nodded shrugged looked roll his eyes laughed gestured friend grinned these are some of my most repeated words but most of these actually are dialogue related actions so I have a big cast of characters that most of the time are always in the same room and they're always talking and and when you have three or more characters sitting around the table and talking instead of saying you know dialogue character said dialogue next character said visually that's very boring and repetitive so we tend to use these actions before after the dialogue to mix things up of it make it more interesting and that's great as long it's not overused and as long as you don't use the same actions over and over again and I definitely tended to default to character nodded or character shrugged dialogue so in order to find your personal repeated words or in general any of the words that I've talked about today there are different tools that can help with that so there's things like word count or calm or you insert a big chunk of text maybe even your whole manuscript and it will create word clouds of your most used words so if you spot that one of them is one of these words if you can easily cut out or something that you notice now that you use a lot so your personal kind of repeated word then you can go into your word doc or your Scribner file and then do you know ctrl F or just search find and replace don't just replace with something because usually that doesn't work but then search further words individually and read all of the instances that they appear in just take it one by one and try to fix them try to take them out or try to replace them I promise you that after you do this your prose will be a lot tighter a lot nicer a lot easier to read and not bogged down by all of these unnecessary words but we definitely use in day-to-day conversations but you don't necessarily want to put those in a novel for people to read so I hope that this was helpful and I hope that you will search for these words in your manuscript and maybe find ways to delete them and replace them and make your manuscript that much better I would love to know if you have some of these personal repetitive words and what they are I think that's very interesting because we tend to be very very different in our writing of course it also depends on Johnna at point of view and everything but leave them in the comments below if you have any I'd love to read about them but that's it for today guys thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next Monday bye

Channel: Iasmina Edina

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Keywords: words to cut from your novel, words to cut fomr your novel, creative writing examples, writing a book for the first time, filter words in writing, repetitive words, iasmina edina, unnecessary words in writing, novel writing, authortube, authors on youtube, how to write a book, creative writing, novel writing tips, writing advice, writing tips, how to write a novel, passive vs active voice, writing a novel, editing tips, best editing advice, book editing, Writing a book

Id: aeSXb7QXGVI

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018