by Aaron Lazar

Created on: November 01, 2006   Last Updated: March 04, 2009

I've collected some great writing advice over the past years. Some of it has worked, and some hasn't. Recently, however, the list of "forbidden" words has grown through advice from fellow writers, agents, editors, and publishers.

It can be paralyzing.

Every time I bump against "that" or "had" in my prose, my heart beats wildly and I worry. "Does this belong here? Does it make my work sound amateurish?"

It's almost impossible to avoid the words on the list. You can't completely eliminate them. It's especially true with dialog. You want your characters to sound as natural as possible.

Let's examine the first word on the list: down.

Now, in most cases it's far superior to write, "Horatio sat at the kitchen table and stared at the congealed eggs on his plate," rather than "Horatio sat down at the kitchen table and stared down at the eggs on his plate." Right? And this rule of thumb is excellent, almost universally applicable. It also works for the word, "up." In America, we use "up," all the time in natural conversation. "Bubba ate up all of Cat's french fries." "Nancy stared up at the ceiling, searching for the right word." "Sonja messed up Veronica's hair and then jumped overboard." And so on. Okay, these are crazy examples, but you get the point. You could certainly eliminate some of those "ups," right? But be careful not to eliminate it in your characters' dialog. You don't want them to sound stilted. It's perfectly okay to use common phrases such as, "Margaret, get down here! Your toast is up."

One of the first pieces of advice given to me (aside from "Cut, cut, cut!") was to avoid the use of gerunds and "ing" verbs. "It's much stronger," I was told, "to use the simple past tense, or ed' verbs." So, like a good doobie, I went back through my first four books and scoured them for "ing"s. I was merciless. Brutal. Barely an "ing" survived.

A few years later, I realized I went too far. The words sounded robotic, too stilted. I needed some of those "ing" verbs to vary the rhythm of the sentences, to make them sound more natural. So, with diligence, I returned to my growing list of novels and revamped them. Now, keep in mind it's always better to write, "Mabel watched the plane land," than "Mabel was watching the plane land."

All right. What about tenses? We all learned the proper way to conjugate verbs and use tenses, such as the case of the past perfect. When something happens in the past, such as a flashback, it's taking place before the current action, which is already

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next Page >>