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How To Write a Book: Crutch Words

Once you start writing you'll find the same words coming to mind to describe something or some action. Don't derail your process and try to start tweezing them out of your manuscript while you're creating. During the draft stages, they are simply signposts for what you want to convey. Where you want to start looking out for them is when you read through what you've written. Get out that trusty thesaurus and find more word options--that is unless you want your reader to see that everyone reacts the same way or moves in the same way. That could alert readers that they're in Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory and now everyone 'strolls' or 'tips their head to one side'.


What I find inexcusable is when an author, an editor, AND the publishing team ignores crutch words. I think about Ana in 50 Shades of Grey who was always biting her lip and when she wasn't doing that she was clambering about. Yes, clambering into elevators, taxis, to her feet from out of a chair, you name it, she clambered. It got so my mental picture of her was shiny upper teeth protruding while she clamped her lower lip between teeth while her lower body was doing some sort of jitterbug. "Oh! Here comes Anastasia! Gamboling like Quasimodo! She can't talk with her lip firmly clenched."


If the writer had looked up the word clamber, she'd have learned that clamber means to "walk awkwardly with effort especially by using both hands and feet" For example: We clambered over the rocks. Soooo once would have raised my brows, but I lost count of the clambering Ana did. And I won't go into the lip biting.


When you're finishing your draft stage, you can pick out a word you've spotted more than once and do a word search. It may pick up repetitions you missed. I did it while writing Meet Me At Père Lachaise and to my surprise I'd been tossing the word "massive" about. I described massive efforts, massive mausoleums, massive gates, and even described poor Jean Héberterne, Modigliani's tragic common-law wife as massively pregnant when she threw herself out a window to her death. It was my first book and I didn't take as much care as I do now, but when you write you don't need crutches.





-- Anna Erikssön Bendewald 

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