Counting Clichés

And so, after countless hours of scribbling in a book, dozens of sticky notes and markers, and much cursing of clichés and repetition, our valiant heroine finishes the on-paper aspect of her editing. On to greater things, such as revising!

In other words, I spent about a month circling stuff that really stinks, and now I've got to go through and fix it all.

One thing I did through my editing process (I can't say I "do" this, since it's the first time I've ever A) edited this far, and B) edited this way) is keep a list of all the words, phrases, and clichés I've overused. There happen to be a lot--more than I expected, but then again, it took me over a year to write this thing. A few times I took month-long breaks, so of course I didn't notice when I repeated myself (from a syntactical perspective). In looking at the big picture, you tend to forget individual things. Oh well. Now time to fix them.

In the meantime, purely for entertainment (and out of curiosity, and maybe a little because I wanted to know for revision purposes), I did a word count on these lovely (not) tendencies of mine. Annnnnnnnnnnd *drumroll* here they are!

In a convenient table as well! :)

Here's what I saw: Ari suddenly realizes stuff quite a lot, actually. When she does, she gasps in shock, something that I noticed right away, surprisingly enough. Unfortunately, I wondered if readers would stare or if they'd just sigh and ignore it. Before I could question myself too much, I began to circle these incidents. As I read, I continued to notice these repetitions and I knew I'd have to get rid of them. Tiernan is frequently expressionless, even though there are many other ways to say the same thing. I figure I can go back and fix those, and in the future I'll try not to use them so much. Just for kicks, I threw in the word shadow, because I was curious.

You may notice "realize" (or some form of it) is in here twice. That is partially because I saw it a lot, and partially because I didn't notice it when I was writing my list. "I realized" is part of the "realize(d)" count.

Other notes: one word I didn't include in the word count was "but". That is because it more than doubled the next highest word count with 878 occurrences. I'd jokingly call it the 1%, except it's not (quite) one percent of the word count. It's .7%, and that's just sad. 2.4% of the book is the word "and", 4.8% is "I", and 6.7% is the word "the". These are statistics I might expect. "But", on the other hand, must be eradicated as much as possible. It's like a weed that I can't get rid of in my still-rough garden of shadows. Sorry, couldn't help the metaphor (it's a very apt description for how I write). On average, it appears 4.6 times per single-spaced Word page and 36.5 times per chapter. Since those numbers are obviously statistical averages, that means that there are some with MORE, which bothers me more than the averages do.

As far as cliché plot devices go, I haven't quite counted all of them, but (and there she is) Ari falls asleep at the end of a chapter six times, wakes up at the beginning of a chapter six times (not always the same chapter transitions), and she descends/falls/is engulfed by darkness/blackness four times (that I could count--it's probably more). I will update this post as I find more silly plot devices.

Now, on to weeding, in keeping with my metaphor. Someday I'll explain it.