Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

This year at YeahWrite our free workshop focuses on everything BUT the writing, with an editorial series that’ll take the words right out of your mouth and put them on the page. Of course, we’re also including some tips on writing so that the eventual edits to your story won’t be the heartbreaking kind where you have to remove an entire character or plot arc and re-evaluate every interaction in your 300,000 word novel.

Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And speaking of navigation, don’t worry: our Navigating Prompts workshop from last year hasn’t gone anywhere. You still have a handy tool to refer to when you’re stumped by a prompt or need help on how to approach it or what judges might be thinking as they read your story.

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month (usually on the Second Sunday) we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

Pulling weeds

As the seasons shift, here in the northern hemisphere our lawns (also, personal pet peeve from Rowan, who’s been a landscaper: please stop having a lawn) are getting overwhelming. Herb and vegetable gardens are in full swing (or would be if we could get like one week of consistent weather), and flower gardens are cycling into summer. The Scarlet Quill Society is cycling, too: from developmental editing to line editing, from broad-brush reads to closer attention to words and phrases. And just as the gardener needs to know what an on-purpose plant looks like and what a weed looks like so that they can pull the weeds early and save trouble later, the editor needs to know what unasked-for things are cropping up in their writing. Not incorrect things, we’ll get to that much later at the copyedit phase, but like many weeds, your writing weeds are often beautiful things growing in places where they’re doing more harm than good.

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you may even be able to recognize your weeds – words, phrases, or other habits that regularly creep into your stories and just hang out there. You know, like all those parentheticals in the last paragraph. But if you’re not in the habit of spotting and pulling weeds early, it’ll take an editor longer to get through your work. And if you’re the editor, you won’t be doing your writer any favors letting these weeds flourish. So with no further ado, let’s get our hands dirty.

Note: if you’re an editor coming in at the developmental editing stage, because there are so many revisions still to go before you’re at a line or copy edit level, it’s not a worthwhile use of your time or the author’s to root every weed out of the garden. However, you should be calling attention to them so that the writer can avoid reintroducing them or doing more of the same as they make developmental changes to the story. If you’re a writer editing your own work, you can and should go ahead and change these things as you come to them. 

Word Weeds

Quick: what’s your favorite word? No, not that one. Petrichor is a great word, yeah, but how often do you use it in your writing? Your favorite word is probably shrug or grin or murmur or weep, and you don’t even know it. That’s because this word is a weed. Here’s how weeds creep in at the word level.

Favorite words and phrases

We all have ‘em. Some words just call to us! BUT: that doesn’t mean we should use them liberally, especially if they’re ten dollar words. Words like “limn” (one of Christine’s favorites) and “seine” (one of Rowan’s) are lovely, lyrical words, but used more than once, they lose their impact or worse, draw the reader out of the story. And the only thing worse than a favorite word is an entire favorite phrase. Before you know it, there’s an entire web page dedicated to the number of times you’ve used the phrase “she tugged her braid.” (Robert Jordan is dead and making fun of him for this hurts no-one, but be kind when you’re pointing out that an author’s characters all raise a single eyebrow all the time.)

Why pull this weed? Well, for one thing it will add a “sameness” to the writing, either boring the reader or taking them out of the story. For another, it saps the strength of the phrase. A good deep breath and a skirt smoothed may in fact be the best way to prepare for an emotionally fraught situation, but not for every situation.

Why water it? Signature moves can help distinguish between characters. It’s not great if every character bites their lip when they’re thinking, but one character might make a habit of it as a personal quirk.

Modifiers, qualifiers, and intensifiers

Does this look like your writing?

• Just
• Very
• Really
• Suddenly
• Almost

While we don’t adhere to the commonly cited “rule” that you shouldn’t use adverbs, there are definitely a few filler words that add little value for the wordcount. There are so many great words out there that if you’re using these more than sparingly, you’re probably missing out on a better word. Most of these qualifiers can be either eliminated altogether, or folded into an appropriate verb. Think about:

Suddenly, the door opened.

vs

The door crashed open.

In this case, the verb “crashed” conveys the sudden and abrupt nature of the door opening.

Why pull this weed? While wordcount isn’t always an issue, these are easy words to eliminate if you’re trying to get your story from 1,300 words to 900. Additionally, they lend a sameness to your descriptive writing even if the actual thing being described is different, because they have repetitive sounds and can function as “the same word” just like the word and phrase weeds do.

Why water it? One big exception to the rule is dialogue. These words are very common (see what I did there?) in conversation. They can help dialogue sound more natural, or emphasize a “friendly, chatty” natural voice in a personal essay. 

Words that don’t actually make you sound smarter

There’s a trope that we hate: that smart people love playing chess, and that being good at chess is an indicator of intelligence. Chess isn’t necessarily about creative intelligence so much as memorization and statistical prediction. Those are both good and interesting skills to have, but neither one of them makes you “smart” even if one or both of them overlaps with intelligence in many cases. Similarly, there’s a brief list of words that people seem to use because they’ve been identified as “smart people words.” The writer assumes that they sound more intelligent when using these words, because they are “the type of words smart people use.” We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but that ain’t true. And overusing or misusing these words has the opposite of the intended effect.

• Thusly. Y’all, settle down and use “that’s why” or “as a result” or something. Thusly isn’t a compact or communicative way of saying what you’re trying to say, and it gets misused at the end of a string of ideas that don’t come to a conclusion that could be introduced with it.
• Such. Saying “The teacher assigned homework but he did not do such homework” doesn’t make you a better writer than “it” or “the homework.” In fact, “such” is literally mocked as a filler word among people who genuinely use words like “such” for precision. [Yes, I mean lawyers. If you’re a lawyer using such ironically because you had to use it unironically so often, we’re still not giving you a pass. Use a definite article and move on with your life. /rbg]
• At this time/at the present point. You know when that is? Now. And you can probably think of a way to even avoid saying that, because it’s often implicit.
• We’ll get to misused colloquialisms later this year, just know it’s a thing. Technically this is “doesn’t make you sound homey or folksy” rather than “doesn’t make you sound smart” but it’s another failure to read the room that can be generally lumped in here. Beta readers are a great way to test your colloquialisms.
• Close proximity to. First of all, it’s redundant; second of all, you mean “by” or “near.”
• The reason being. You mean, um… “because?” Unless you’re trying to fill space in your graduate thesis (in which case ignore all the advice in this section, good luck, please remember to shower, and eat something with some vegetables in it)

Why pull this weed? These words and phrases take up space, add nothing to your story, and don’t make you sound smarter.

Why water it? On the other hand, they’re a great way to pad out the dialogue of characters who think they sound smart.

Verbs

We hear the advice “show, don’t tell” repeatedly. And then we’re encouraged to “just use more verbs!” But some verbs actually get in the way.

• Looked
• Felt
• Seemed
• Started/began to

There’s nothing wrong with any of these verbs, if used intentionally and sparingly. But verbs like “seemed” and “started [to do an action]” clutter up and slow down your writing, and they are especially insidious. Hitesh looked sad. Was he sad, or did he just look sad? If he was sad, how can you show this? What does “looking sad” even mean? Midori started to open the door. Unless there’s a reason that she stops, and her opening the door is critical to a plot point, why is this motion even here?  

Why pull this weed? There’s often a more active way to describe what’s really going on, which will engage the reader more thoroughly.

Why water it? Sometimes you genuinely need to use one of these verbs. But not as often as you think, so considering every time you see one whether it’s necessary will help you only use them when you need them.

Redundant phrases

• Whispered softly
• Tiptoed stealthily
• Laughed happily
• Blurted abruptly

Yes, adverbs are designed to modify verbs, among other things, but consider whether or not the verb already contains what the adverb is trying to convey. Your character doesn’t need to “whisper softly,” or even “whisper under her breath.” The verb “whisper” already means to speak softly. Use your word processor to search for words ending in -ly to help you scan for redundant adverbs. 

Why pull this weed? You don’t need to say it twice. Trust your reader. Also this will often score you points from people who have been trained to despise adverbs, so you can look like a better writer as a side effect. (Adverbs are fine, they can relax, but hey why turn down an easy win?)

Why water it? If your adverb contrasts with your verb, you can use those moments for effect. Laughing sadly, tiptoeing noisily, whispering loudly, all of these things add flavor to your text and tell the reader more about what’s going on.

Grammatical weeds

Sometimes we are so focused on telling our story that we fall into comfortable habits that detract from the actual art of writing. This is the moment when you learn that not everything that’s an error in storytelling or writing is technically incorrect in grammar. In fact? Trying to edit yourself into perfect grammar is more likely to introduce these weeds than to help you pull them. One of the ways to catch these types of errors is to read your work out loud – you’ll quickly find yourself tripping over any habitual phrasing.

Sentence structure

Weeds. They grow up between your sentences, even. It’s rude. As you edit, however, it’s a good idea to see if you’re starting every paragraph with a participial phrase or subordinate clause, or even stringing together several sentences that start the same way. Consider:

Shrugging into his jacket, Feno straightened his shoulders. Running his hand through his hair, he resigned himself to looking disheveled. Taking a deep breath, he walked to the door and opened it, stepping into the hall.

There’s a lot wrong with that paragraph, but mostly it feels monotonous. Why? Because every sentence starts with the same structure even if it’s not the same words. Shake it up a little. Turn some of those phrases into more active sentences, rearrange what you’ve written, or even rewrite them entirely.

Feno shrugged into his rumpled jacket, trying to compensate for his lack of ironing with a surfeit of perfect posture. There was nothing he could do about his bedhead without the comb he’d left in his quarters two days and what felt like a lifetime ago. He took a moment to compose himself before leaving the safety of his borrowed bedroom. 

The second example is more active, with a less predictable rise and fall if you were to read it out loud. It also conveys a lot more information about Feno’s state of mind. And yet it doesn’t sacrifice the important information contained in the first example. And obviously you don’t have to get rid of every participial phrase, so long as you don’t use them in every sentence.

Why pull this weed? Participial phrases are the “baby shark” of writing. They get stuck on your sentences and the rhythm sounds the same to your reader over and over and over. Also, they’re a trap! Save yourself from the dread dangling participle!

Why water it? Sometimes you genuinely need to use that word order to convey ongoing action or set a scene. Not using it when you don’t need it means having this important tool available when you do.

Punctuation

We love a good semicolon or em-dash around here, but punctuation, overused, becomes a weed. Do your characters always… pause in the middle of speaking? Do your paragraphs, especially in dialogue, trail off in an ellipsis? Do you use commas to indicate every, single, place, a reader, should, breathe? How many parentheticals do you (yes, you) really need? Yes, punctuation can be used creatively and expressively, but a) learn the rules before you break them, and b) break those rules when you need to for voice, and follow them when they’re needed for clarity. Some examples:

• Ellipsis: Can you just end the sentence? Does everything have to just…. 
• Dashes: En dashes. Em dashes. Hyphens. Know the difference between them! Are parentheses (or commas, or (gasp) a semicolon) more appropriate?
• Commas: Sometimes you can’t (and shouldn’t) avoid them, of course, but don’t use them to dictate where your reader should breathe. They’re probably not reading the story out loud, and even if they are they’ve made it this far without being told when to breathe!
• Semicolons: Are you often squashing two sentences together? If they’re becoming unmanageably long, there are very few places you can put a semicolon where you can’t put a period.

Honestly if a type of punctuation exists, someone’s probably overusing it. Just try not to let any one kind overwhelm your writing. If you notice ellipses breeding in your dialogue or dashes sneaking in around all your ideas (they’re not better than parentheses, and you wouldn’t do that to a parenthesis) consider restructuring some of your sentences to let your reader relax and hear the story you’re telling. Looking at you, Shatner.

Why pull this weed? Punctuation is like seasoning. Use the right amount and your meal will be amazing. Use too much, or use the wrong kind, and suddenly Gordon Ramsey is spitting your food onto his plate and talking conspiratorially to the cameraman. 

Why water it? Punctuation is like seasoning. As long as the English language keeps colonizing it, you should use the full range of it to do what you’re trying to do.

Situational weeds

Sometimes it’s not a word that gets overused, but the way you tell your story. If you lean on specific scenes in all your stories, they’re probably weeds, and they’re going to overwhelm your longer work. 

Scene openers and closers

Do a quick scan of your scene openers. Do you tend to start chapters with a description of someone waking up? It’s a convenient way to start a scene, yes, but doing it more than once or twice means your story will start to sound like a diary entry. (Ditto for ending chapters with falling asleep.) Can you skip the morning routine and jump straight into the action? 

And it doesn’t have to be waking up or going to sleep, although this is the most common culprit across the most writers. Getting out of a car/bus/train, opening a door, looking up from work, all of these things can be insidious scene opener weeds. Yes, it’s great to imply that your character was doing something more important, or doing something that happens outside the four corners of the page. It just shouldn’t all be the same thing, if you don’t want to give your readers the impression that your main character just cruises around in a taxi all day waiting for plot to happen so they can get out of the car.

Why pull this weed? In the absence of other information, readers really will assume that your characters wake up every morning, go to bed every night, and use available transportation to get from place to place. You don’t add anything to the story when you spell that out.

Why water it? Sometimes the manner of waking up or going to sleep or getting to a place or whether the door opens? It matters to your story. Pulling this weed everywhere it doesn’t matter makes room for the reader to notice it when it does.

In-jokes and expert knowledge

We’ve talked a bit about TSOR, but what about when you’ve done thirty hours of research? Are you an avid mariner with extensive knowledge of wooden sailing ships? That’s wonderful. You’re probably not going to make technical mistakes about which sail is going up when the ship sets out in your pirate adventure story. But you don’t have to spend the entire story listing the types of ships the pirates might encounter in order to spin a good yarn, matey. While it’s tempting to put in every bit of information you’ve learned about sheep in your story with a knitter in it, stop and ask yourself if it’s something the reader actually needs in order to understand what’s going on, or if you just needed to know it in order to pick out the few bits the reader does need, and to prevent you from making mistakes about what you put in.

This goes double for in-jokes. If nobody but you and two friends from third grade know that you based a character on a pop song that you all liked, there’s no need to sneak in every lyric from that song. The easter egg will be lost on your readers, and the lyrics don’t add anything to the story but a potential copyright lawsuit. If you’re writing something private for those two friends, of course, go for it!

Why pull this weed? We know it’s sad when you had to learn a thing and have nowhere to show it off, but you’re going to get in the way of your story jamming in unrelated facts about combine harvesters. In academia, you can spot this weed by the length of the footnote: a footnote with ten journal articles in it for one fact is usually trying to prove that the author read all those articles; what the paper really needs is one article that says the fact best.

Why water it? Sometimes the reader genuinely does need to know how to play a 17th century card game in order to understand that a character is cheating at the game.

Meals

People gotta eat, right? Putting characters together around a table is a great way to highlight relationships and pass along information that the reader needs via conversation – especially if you’re writing in first person and there’s no other way for your POV character to get that information. But if your story moves from one meal (and one infodump) to the next, it’s going to feel stagnant. In the absence of other information, your reader is going to assume that your character did eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner (or whatever meals in whichever combination are correct for the story’s setting and culture). Too many meals and your story will feel like a child’s report from summer camp. 

Dearest Mummy: Today for breakfast we had pancakes, with bacon and syrup. Then we went for a hike. For lunch we had sandwiches and I gave Nevaeh the tomato off mine and she gave me her lettuce. It was sunny so we went for a swim. For dinner there was hot dogs and potato salad. We made s’mores for dessert.

Do you actually care about the pancakes? No. You care about where the kids went on their hike and what they saw, and whether everyone was wearing their life jackets in the lake that afternoon. The meals are preventing you from accessing the interesting part of the story, and are twice as long as the things you do care about.

Why pull this weed? Like waking up and going to sleep, meals can feel like a way to mark time. But we have clocks for that. You can just tell the reader what time it is, instead of making a journal entry out of it.

Why water it? Sometimes meals are important ways to demonstrate culture, caste, or customs. And sometimes they’re just important to a character. Nero Wolfe wouldn’t be the same person if he weren’t such a gourmet.

Superfluous blocking

If you’ve ever played a typical tabletop role-playing game, you might be accustomed to listing each action as it happens, in order to preserve clarity and make sure you have enough chances to survive whatever the dungeon master is about to throw at you. “I go up to the door. I listen at the door. I look at the lock. I try the handle. I open the door. I look through the door. I walk into the next room. I turn around. I close the door.” That’s a fine way to describe actions if you need to roll a die every time you move to see if you’re about to fall into a pit trap, but in storytelling it just bogs down the narrative. It’s not just gamers who are guilty of step-by-step narration (for the record we’re picking on gamers because we’re them). Writers do it to draw out a scene, or because they’re trying to account for where a character is in relation to another, or because they want to accurately depict what’s happening as if transcribing the action of a movie scene. To this we say, trust your reader! For the most part, a reader will understand that to go from one room to the next with a closed door between, the character will walk up to it, turn the knob, and open the door. Once you realize you’re doing it, it’s much easier to avoid bogging down your writing with unnecessary phrases. It’s fine to write the scene this way in first draft, but by the time it’s with an editor you should have taken out all the extra steps… literally.

Why pull this weed? It’s so many words! You can save so many words! And if that didn’t persuade you, you’re bogging down your action (or bedroom) scenes, two places where you really need the reader to not be bored.

Why water it? Make sure there’s enough information there for the reader to trust you with the rest. Sometimes – for example, if you have aphantasia – this can mean literally putting pieces on a board and describing every move they make. In the first draft. That way you know that what you’re editing back from is accurate.

Hackneyed phrases

We know, we know – sometimes a phrase perfectly describes exactly what you want to say, or a common situation seems like the best way to resolve your plot. But that’s exactly what makes it a trope or cliché. It’s so perfect that it’s become overused. That doesn’t mean never use these ideas (oh my god they were roommates), but if you have other options, consider not. Especially if you’re writing in a context where your work will be read or collected in conjunction with other works on similar themes, it’s a great way to make sure your writing doesn’t stand out at all.

As Mackenna watched her lover walk away for the last time, a single tear rolled down her cheek.

We get it. It’s a lovely image for a frame in a graphic novel, or a book jacket. But there are at least a thousand different ways to depict grief, even restrained grief; this one is used so frequently that it’s lost its impact. Remember: if you’ve heard or read it before, it’s likely that many other people have too. If you’ve heard it enough to fall in love with it, others – especially submissions editors and contest judges – will have heard it often enough to fall right back out of love with it no matter how much they liked it in the first place.

Phrases or descriptions to avoid:

• A single tear to depict grief (yes, we’re saying it again!)
• Letting out a breath they didn’t know they were holding to depict relief
• Clenching one’s jaw (or fist) or gritting one’s teeth to depict anger or frustration
• Butterflies (or knots) in the stomach to depict nervousness or anticipation
• Looking in the mirror as a means to describe your character

It might take a little extra work to come up with a phrase that isn’t a cliche, but your readers (and editors!) will thank you for it!

Why pull this weed? Are you tired of reading this question yet? That’s at least how tired your editor is of that single tear. Especially if the character’s eyes well up first. We cannot stress this enough.

Why water it? There’s always the Bulwer Lytton contest.

In conclusion…

Some of this sounds a lot like line or copy editing, doesn’t it? It is – but it’s also designed to help you notice patterns in your own work as you write so that the editing isn’t a nightmare. If you’re dev editing and you start spotting these patterns in a writer’s work, call their attention to it with some “top level comments, I’ve flagged a couple instances so you can see what I’m talking about but not every one because I don’t want to waste your time and money” and move on.

Good luck, and may your garden thrive!

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society on Sunday, June 12 at 2:00 pm US Eastern Time.

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place on the (usually; we’ll warn you!) second Sunday of every month at 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time. Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session
• $5 monthly subscription: Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!
• $3 monthly subscription: Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists.

Rules of Order. Order of Rules. Something like that.

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read: Editing nonfiction: how much is enough?
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read: Line- and copyediting: getting picky
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read: Finishing touches and final checklists: more than just spellcheck!
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read: DIWhy? what you can (and can't) do yourself
• Watch: December meeting

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author:

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author: