Revising 101

purging internal clichés

I often advise writers to push to the end of a project before spending too much time tweaking pages that may eventually be left on the cutting room floor. It also makes sense to do large-scale plot, character-arc and structural work before polishing. But once you have a draft whose shape you’re fairly confident about, it’s time to look at it closely, hone the prose and make the formatting clear. Sentences should have variation in length and grammatical structure. You want your dialogue formatted consistently. Section or chapter breaks, too. Reading aloud can help a lot. And while an outside reader or workshop is invaluable at this stage, it’s a good idea to take your manuscript absolutely as far as you can on your own before you expend the good will of such readers. To that end, I suggest doing what I call an Internal Cliché Purge.

Internal clichés may take the form of verbal ruts or tics, words and phrases that you use frequently, overused imagery, or grammatical constructions that you default to when more variation would provide a better reading experience. They aren’t clichés in the usual sense of phrases so familiar they have lost their freshness and meaning. Internal clichés are specific to your voice. The goal is to get a new window onto the way you express things, and make sure you’re not excessively repeating yourself — whether words, constructions or ideas.

I like the free online tool Voyant for searching out these internal clichés. You can paste an entire novel into it and swiftly get an analysis of how frequently you’ve used various words and phrases. I recently ran it on a manuscript and discovered I’d used the word just a staggering number of times. I was able to easily review every instance of the word in the context of the larger sentence it appeared in, making it painless to eliminate many of them. From now on, I’ll think twice every time that word pops out of my keyboard.

Voyant can also generate a word cloud and has several additional ways of visualizing your word and phrase usage. There are many other world cloud generators available online, including a free add-on Extension for Google Docs that I find very simple to use.

Try it, and see if it helps you make line edits, eliminate repetitions or internal clichés — and perhaps even to become aware enough of your verbal ruts that you’ll avoid them in the first place, next time out.

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If you’re enjoying The Engines of Narrative, you might be interested in my summer prose workshop of the same name. It’s generative, supportive and challenging. You can share and get feedback on up to 45 pages of writing. The Summer 2024 session will take place on Zoom over 10 Wednesday evenings (ET) from June-August. Find out more here.