HEAVY ON THE MUSTARD, BUT HOLD THE PECCADILLOES

Revising first drafts is the best way I know to come face to face with one's feet of clay. Engaged in the process the other day, I encountered—yet again—one of my favorite transgressions (an unnatural and probably unhealthy attachment to the word "just") and found myself wondering about other writers. Am I the only sinner in the congregation? Do other writers, even my heroes, have recurring peccadilloes that must be revised out of every first draft? Just in case you've ever wondered about that, too, I decided to put on my girl reporter hat and investigate.

What I found out, fellow sinners, is that we're in good company. Our numbers are legion.

Just," it seems, is favored by many. Pat Gaffney says, "I use the hell out of 'just,' but it's a hot button now, so I edit it out as I go along." Mary Jo Putney shares my affection for the word. Jo Beverley regularly does search and destroy missions on it, and Linda Howard confesses to an unhealthy attachment, too, as well as to "only." (Well, drat...and here I thought "only" was the perfect cure for using "just." Although sometimes I get real fancy and say "simply.")

Tess Gerritsen admits to overusing "now" and "there." Kay Hooper counts "wry" and "rueful" among her closest friends. Sylvie Kurtz ruthlessly exorcises "Ands" and "Buts" at the beginnings of sentences. Karen Harbaugh finds herself awash in "thats."

Sometimes it's not a favorite word, but a pattern. Laura Resnick counts adjectives as her most persistent habit: "I seem to spend a lot of time putting in adjectives because I like them and I'm so determined to convey absolutely EVERYTHING as SPECIFICALLY as possible to the reader."

"Word repetitions make me nuts," says Susan Elizabeth Phillips. "'He looked at her. She looked as if she were far away.'" Karen Harbaugh notes that "I'll write the same thought or write a character revelation I'd gone over before. I almost hate to admit this. It's like telling an old joke I've told over and over again, but forgetting that I've told it." Lucy Gordon remarks, "I'm so fixed on the sentence I'm writing now that I forget what I said in the last one." She puts it down to intense concentration. (And says that's her story, and she's sticking to it.) Harbaugh is quick to note, however, that some repetitions are important: "There's a difference between this and the repetition that comes from a character revisiting an issue and resolving it, or one that arises from a triggering thematic image."

Teresa Medeiros admits to a popular foible: Too Many Words. "I love them so much that I use too many. I frequently catch myself going back and simply cutting the last sentence of many paragraphs. It makes it so much cleaner! Once I get on a roll, I just don't know when to stop." (Amen, Sister. Count me in.) Putney agrees: "My natural voice is 18th century essayist, with lots of words and phrases, and it's a constant effort to whittle away to clean, smooth prose. Things like 'a bit of a problem' instead of 'a problem' or 'more than a little upset' rather than 'upset.' This tendency suited traditional Regencies rather well, but quite gets in the way with American setting contemporaries. I -love- dependent clauses—they spring out like warriors from dragon's teeth."

A corollary is what I think of as overwriting. Never trust the reader to "get it" when you can make sure of it with just a few more perfectly lovely words, seems to be my first instinct. Medeiros: "I find myself writing things like 'Holly Heroine's skin crawled with dread' or 'Herbert Hero's heart swelled with joy.' Well, my editor pencils them right out because she says (God love her!) that my dialogue and actions are powerful enough that the reader already knows what my characters are feeling without me having to tell them."

Nasty ol' passive voice nails us all now and then. "I'll lapse into the passive voice out of laziness and must whip those sentences back to active form," says Gerritsen. Christine Rimmer rues that eradicating passive voice "never happens until the final edit, when all of a sudden I realize there's 'was' everywhere I look. Once I had so many passive-to-active changes in my AA's [Author Alterations] that I wrote an apology to my editor in my cover letter when I sent the changes back. She was wonderfully good-natured about it. Laughed on the phone to me, "One thing about you, Christine, you never give up. Most authors will get about halfway through the manuscript, get tired, and ease off a little on something like this. But not you."

Stage direction trips up many of us, too. I sometimes have so much choreography going on that I could give the reader whiplash. Hooper's confession relieved me: "I had everybody looking at everybody else so often that it got funny. I mean, I'm big on stage direction, but that was ridiculous. And since the copyeditor had flagged countless pages noting that I had 'used look or looked four times here' I became even more conscious of it. In the book following that one, I was paranoid about it, and doubt any character even glanced at another one for chapters."

Punctuation issues bedevil us, too. Beverley does search and destroy on exclamation points which are, she notes, much more common in British style. Laurie Campbell pleads guilty to italics abuse. I'm a reformed commaholic, though my English-major daughter swears I've simply transferred my addiction to em dashes.

Cursing presents its own challenges. Gerritsen relates that her first-draft male characters "tend to swear like sailors and I need to clean up their language. Which is not easy, because there's nothing so laughably unbelievable as hearing a hard-bitten cop mutter a prissy 'oh, darn!'" Writing in the fantasy realm, Laura Resnick is challenged by finding suitable replacements for curses. "'Go to hell!' is anachronistic and 'F*** you!' is simply too colloquial to sound right in a sword-and-sorcery world, in my opinion." Her solution? "I mine Shakespeare and other long-dead writers for my curses."

Resnick is wary of other anachronisms in fantasy. "Sometimes I look at the previous day's work, for example, and discover I wrote something like 'they traveled many miles beneath the burning sun' or whatever. Well, oops! Miles—that's an anachronism unless you're setting your fantasy novel in our reality." Another example: "..the 'stygian darkness' of night. Well, oops! This adjective is derived specifically from the river Styx in Greek mythology; IN LEGEND BORN takes place in a completely imaginary fantasy world where, er, there is no Greece, let alone Greek mythology. Here's another one: We commonly use the word 'hell' in a variety of ways for a whole series of universal verbal needs (anger, frustration, menace, embarrassment, dramatic pronouncements, etc.); yet it is a word inspired by Christian mythology, and therefore out of place in a fantasy novel where, oops!, there's no such thing as Christianity."

Likewise, historical authors must constantly be on guard. Putney notes the importance of learning to question everything. "You simply can't assume that the way it is today is the way it was two hundred years ago. Or that common animals or foods of today were around in other countries and other times. (A good way to irritate serious medieval readers is to have the characters eating potatoes.) The questions that you don't think to ask are the ones that will turn around and bite you." Beverley notes the special attention that must be paid, when writing pre-16th century stories, to avoiding Shakespearean references. Hooper, though not writing historicals, has a similar concern in her current series of paranormal thrillers: "having to remember the "rules" I've created—such as psychics cannot be hypnotized, for instance—and make sure those aren't broken from story to story."

So I'm in sterling company, I'm relieved to discover, not, after all, the only one guilty of transgressions so automatic that they don't even register in the first draft. (Oooh, "even"—another fave!) Hooper summed it up best: "But hey, without our peccadilloes, copyeditors wouldn't have jobs, right?"

© Jean Brashear