Ah, pet words. Those favorite words that pop up everywhere in your manuscript when you're writing. One of the most irritating problems us writers (I think) is weeding out these words so redundancy doesn't weigh down on your story.

I'm afraid I'm one of the worst when it comes to pet words. My list of words to look out for is loooong. And because I thought it'd be fun to ask people to list their own pet words, here's my list, off the top of my head:

1. Eye (which is the worst of my pet words)

2. Face (which is the second worst)

3. Hand (Third worst)

4. Thing

5. Feral

6. Voice (Forth worst)

7. Expression

8. Blank

9. Head

How do you weed out those pesky pet words and write them off? How do you go about changing the sentence that word inhabits? Do you omit the sentence? Or rewrite it?

Come on, thoughts?

--edited by Amber Wolfe on 1/3/2015, 6:42 AM--

Good subject to raise.

I find pet words themselves fairly easy to deal with in rewrite. Most of the time another similar word will work, or the sentence can be reworked. The issue I find more commonly is a repetitive sentence structure or turn of phrase, but this usually pops out in review and can be rewritten.

What trips me up more often is that I fall in love with a turn of phrase or character gesture, and find it worms its way into my writing. Then I have to rethink things more seriously, and sometimes rework a character, which means going back through the novel's manuscript and hoping I don't miss anything. For example, I find myself writing that characters will have a 'little smile' of some kind, whether mysterious, bitter, or whimsical. Or I'll have a character notice a character's eyes. Then I have to rethink. Some characters will notice eyes, others mouths, others body movement. Still others may be so self-absorbed they don't notice much other than their own feelings and sensations. I find myself working that stuff out more in advance, and hoping it leads to the richness and clarity I'm looking for.

Finally there's the sort of sophomore jinx that I am finding along with some writer friends. As we get more aware of the pitfalls in our writing through our own critical re-writing and the feedback we receive, we can become paralyzed during initial storytelling and get bogged down. That's why I try not to pay any attention to this stuff until I start in re-writing, which works fine for pet words and turns of phrase but not so great for character tendencies, because in the latter case the fix is more arduous.

Finally, what's more important, smoothing out the writing or telling the story? I think it pays to let the story play out first, even if the rewrite gets painful.

Thanks, Amber, for raising the issue.

Good points, Bob. I agree with letting the story be told before going back and revising--Personally, I write out a scene and then go back to nitpick a bit, though I save the major revisions for after the story's written out. I mean, you can't properly weed out the major problems until you've finished the manuscript. And I find it kind of funny, because I'll be writing and thinking 'wow, this is going so great! I won't have to change anything about this scene because it's coming together so nicely and people will love it and there's nothing wrong with it because it sounds so great . . . .' And it's when I leave it alone for a couple days and go back to it that I realize I've got the word 'eye' seven times in that scene, followed up by six 'face'.

Oh, well. Here's another set of pet words I remembered:

1. Stare

2. Gaze

3. Sigh

4. Growl

5. Snarl

6. Hiss

C'mon people. Don't be shy. Let's have some fun and list our pet words. We've all got them.

This is an interesting question. I don’t know that I have a lot of pet words. In revision, I’ll change sentences and paragraphs so I don’t use the same word twice too closely together. I have other pet devices, though.

Many of my stories occur in the out-of-doors. A pair or a family of barred owls calling to one another at night,  and they’ll do it in every month of the year, or the sight of the Milky Way turning in a moonless night, away from the light pollution of a town or a shopping mall, can add much to a scene. I fight with myself not to overuse these.

I described the freckles that run past the open buttons and down into the shirt of a woman. I used this in one story in my first book, and I used it  in one story in my second book, and I was called on it by two of my readers. They remembered. How long do I have to wait before I can use this image again? 

We should enjoy our pets, and then get them outside before they piddle on the floor of the story. That would not be good. Naughty puppy!

And again, with no action on my part, an entire paragraph was added to my post by the site software. The opening part was copied from a post I didn't quote, and the second part is the crap the site appends to anything you copy in the forum and paste into an external document.

I think the site has termites.

Perry, totally understand what you're saying about not letting the 'puppy' piddle on the story.

Jay, you seem to have a lot of errors with this site. Ones nobody else seems to have--though I do have that problem where if I try to copy and paste something I'll get a pretty link at the end of it for my troubles. Hope that doesn't keep you from using the site. We budding writers need our grumpy writing coach

Hi Jay--Next time you get one of these errors, take a screenshot and send it to Support@BookCountry.com so I can show the developers. Otherwise, they don't have enough info to diagnose.

Thank you!

Lucy