Status Updates From Refuse to Be Done: How to W...

weasel words
words that suck that life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell

ex: that

highlight when you explain something
see how often you are doing this

either the action on the page isn't sufficiently clear for the read to understand or feel on their own . . . or else you're overexplaining what a smart and sensitive reader should be able to understand/feel for themselves

The stick I've employed in the last five years is to have characters chatter away and then, in the next draft, take out every other line. Oddly enough, the speech has more life, more surprise.

replace the smile/shug/sigh
be more artful about it

now highlight when you give backstory for characters
- what is necessary

highest strongest sentences
weakest sentences

- make sure stressed syllables in a sentence outnumber the unstressed syllables
- the few unstressed there are, ,the more impact the sonic will have
- end your sentences with the stressed syllables
- train your ear for this

verbs
- diminish thought tags (she wondered, she understood, etc)
- diminish sensory verbs (saw, looked, watched, etc)
- diminish to be

vary sentence and paragraph lengths

consider how the camera moves through a scene, clearly mark transition and time and space (make timeline of time/location)

cut the opening paragraph. cut the last paragraph. do that for each scene. now rewrite the ones that have to be there, let the rest die

take a page of your most lifeless page, pick out the best sentences, and then retype those sentences onto a new page

"form of attention" . . . as you move through the life around you, you'll see it simultaneously with your own eyes and with the eyes of your novel