All writers have their pet words — and I don’t mean “fluffy” or “spot.” I recently discovered that, like a hamster running the same wheel day-in and day-out, that I keep re-using two words in my writing: “okay” and “then.”
“Are you okay?” “Is it okay to go back in the house?”, “Okay, I don’t know what you are talking about, okay?”
Maybe it’s because I was a teen during the 1980s. We used “okay” a lot, along with “anyway,” “like” and the always useful “gag me with a spoon.”
“Okay” is often a problem word for writers of historical fiction because it is modern vernacular. If you look online, you can find various stories of the origin of this word. Since my story takes place in 1906 it is okay for me to use “okay.” But, it’s NOT okay for me to overuse it. Since I use MSWord, I was able to use the search function to find every instance of the word. It was simple to replace some of these “okay”s with words like “fine,” “safe”, and “all right.”
Okay, so I was in the process of doing this, and then I discover an even bigger problem. I am even worse about overusing the word “then.” I tend to use it to show action.
This happened, then this happened, then this and then this!
I prefer writing dialogue, okay? Writing action scenes has been a learning process for me. But, when I searched for the word “then” in my manuscript I came up with over 80 hits. Yikes. Then I read through each one and noticed that I could almost always drop the word without harming the sentence. “Then” was unnecessary and only served to weaken the sentence. In other words then, the sentence was okay without it.
So my question for you, is “Okay, like what is YOUR pet word then?”
I will have to think on that one, but likely it may be the same as yours.
Blessings, andrea