Category: spelling

Well, I offered you all a chance to make requests and not one of you took me up on it. Which means I get to rant about whatever I want this week. If you want rants more focused to your particular needs right now, just let me know down below.

But for now…

Back in November I talked about my drafting process—taking something from that messy, ugly first draft through to something I’m not ashamed to show my beloved or friends or, well, my agent. One part of that was my third draft, where I tighten and cut. And guess what? I just finished my third draft of TOS two weeks ago. And I took a bunch of notes as I was going through, because I was planning ahead for this.

Also, keep in mind this isn’t one-size-fits-all advice. Your story is your story, and your writing process is your process. Like so much stuff I toss out here I’m showing you how I do things with the hope it’ll help you figure out how you should be doing things.

So let’s talk about some cuts I made.

First off, I did a basic spellcheck. I’ve talked about spellcheckers a lot, and about using them correctly. I go through the manuscript one click at a time, examining each and every word the spellchecker flags. I don’t just blindly agree to change everything it says is a mistake because… well, it’s usually wrong. For example, it doesn’t recognize a lot of given names, and definitely a lot of nicknames, so I had to check each of those (or add them to the dictionary in some cases). Then there were words it just didn’t have (cyborg? Still? Really?) and a few where it refused to recognize a more common, alternate spelling (which, if I really wanted to put the work in, could probably tell me exactly which dictionary was fed into this particular spellchecker).

Again, each and every word. Check all of it. I’d guess the breakdown ended up being around 35% actual mistakes, 65% things that were correct but it flagged as mistakes.

Also, a lot of the time while going through, I’d check the whole sentence. Was there a better word to use? A better way to phrase this? Maybe switch a name to a pronoun?

This spellcheck pass took close to a full work day for a 300 page book. Sound like a lot? I mean, it averages out to about a minute and a half per flagged word. Some were easy to zip past. Some took a minute or two as I double-checked spellings myself or considered other factors (like I was just talking about). Plus, to be completely honest, I think I slowed down a bit while I was eating lunch. And I stopped to use the bathroom twice. On company time! I know!!!

Anyway… after this, I started doing passes for passes for different words. Lots of different words.

Adverbs and adjectives are some obvious culprits. I’m not one of those “kill all adverbs” zealots, but I do think a lot of the time they can use a good pruning. I once got to talk with editor Pat LoBrutto and his advice was “one adverb per page, four adjectives.” Like any rule, I think there’s some flex room in there, and different situations will call for different things. But I also think a lot of times we do overuse adverbs and adjectives because we just don’t know the really, really good word we could be using.

Some of the words and phrases I look for are what a friend of mine called “somewhat syndrome.” For me, it usually kicks in when a character says, for example, Yakko stood six foot four. It sounds too precise for a casual observation, right? Weirdly exact. So we write things like “Yakko stood a little over six feet” or “he was around six feet” or “stood a bit taller than six feet.” I used to do this a lot, with pretty much every description of anything, and it still show up sometimes when I’ve got a sort of casual, limited third person POV. So I search for a lot of things like about, kind of, sort of, around

There’s also a bunch of phrases that we tend do toss in, but we’re not using them correctly. Looked like, appeared to be, seemed to be, and constructions like that. These feel like the somewhat words and phrases I just mentioned, but almost all of these are part of an implied contradiction. Yakko looked like he was over six feet tall (but it was all just high boot heels). The door appeared to be made of wood (but was actually a veneer over steel plate). The car seemed to be in working order (but would fall apart if you drove it more than ten miles). See what I mean? What I probably want to say here is just Yakko was over six feet tall, the door was made of wood, and the car was in working order. So I should cut some extra words (that I wasn’t using correctly anyway) and just say that.

Also, there’s a bunch of verbs that have… well, they’re verbs we inherently associate with certain things. I shrug my shoulders. Nod my head. Point with my finger. I mean, it’s so understood if I told you “I pointed across the room”… well, what would you think I was pointing with? Which means those are all extra words. Just shrug. Just nod. Just point. You can probably think of a few, too.

Finally, there’s a bunch of words that fall into different categories and… look, they’re pretty much always good words to take a second look at. Very. Just. Rather. Really. Actually. Of course. Quite. So. Began to. Suddenly. I think some of these Benjamin Dreyer has pointed at (with his finger) as words you can almost always cut.

And yes, for the most part, these are going to be small cuts. But small cuts add up. When I was done making pass after pass for all these words and phrases… I’d effectively cut twelve pages out of my manuscript. Over three thousand words.

Want a few quick examples?

I cut 196 uses of very.

Also cut 141 uses of really.

And 139 maybes.

118 uses of kind of.

86 uses of about.

80 arounds.

Going off a standard 250 words per page for a double-spaced manuscript, that’s three pages gone right there.

Now in all fairness, every one of these wasn’t just that specific word. Sometimes while doing a pass and looking at everything (because, like with spellcheck, I don’t want to just delete everything that comes up), I’d realize I could reword a sentence, or maybe reword one and delete another. For example, out of those 196 words that vanished in the very pass, I’d guess maybe only 100-120 of them were the word “very” and the rest were other things.

Also, a small tip. Have you ever done find-and-replace on something and then discover you’ve accidentally created a bunch of mistakes throughout your manuscript? Like, you decide maybe Beth should be named Liz, but then discover her girlfriend now studies Elizalizan playwrights? Same principle holds here. I don’t want to just delete every very, for example, because then I’m also going to mess up every, everyone, delivery, slavery, recovery, and more.

And again… yeah, this is slow work. Slow, boring work. That’s what editing is a lot of the time. But it’s also a chance to sharpen things. Concentrate them. To make this hit a little harder and that get a bigger thrill. Editing might not be as thrilling as that initial raw creation, but I still get some creative joy out of it.

And I bet you will, too.

Also, I just realized I used this title for an editing post about twelve and a half years ago. What a hack.

Next time, unless somebody has a topic or question they’d rather I blather on about, I’m probably going to talk about the first time I saw Yakko Warner.

Until then, go write.

Well, here we are in the far flung sci-fi future year of 2025. The year of Pacific Rim, as I mentioned in the newsletter the other day. What? You’re still not subbed to the newsletter? Well, there’s your first thing to do this year.

Anyway, first ranty blog post of the year (and already running late). What to write about? I’ve already planned out a lot of my year, writing-wise, and maybe so have you. Or maybe not. No worries there, either way. This is my job, so I’ve got to schedule things to some extent. You may have a lot more leeway. Heck, writing might be your zero-stress after work cool-down thing. If that’s how you like to do it, that’s great. What works for you works for you.

I’ve had a couple possible topics bouncing around in my head for two weeks now. And in that time I’ve seen a lot of other folks offering their own start-of-the-year advice nuggets. And that got me thinking even more…

So, look, some of you may be thinking of finally writing that novel. 2025 is the year we’re getting it done. Maybe we’re starting from scratch. Could be we’ve had a few false starts. Maybe some of it’s already done and this is the year we finish it.

And it’s possible, as I mentioned above, that you’re seeing all sorts of advice and encouragement from different folks.

They’ll tell you not to worry about how much you write every day. Don’t worry about how often you write. And don’t worry about spelling. Don’t worry about grammar, either. Don’t worry about structure. Don’t worry about getting the facts right. None of that matters! What matters is the writing! Which, uh, you don’t have to do today.

And it may cross your mind after some of this, well, hang on. What the heck am I doing? If none of this stuff matters… I mean, what am I supposed to do? Seriously?

This is a little tricky to understand because technically all of this is true, but it’s true at different points in the process and in different ways. If I apply all of these rules (or lack of rules, I guess) evenly throughout my whole process, I can be doing more harm than good.

For example, I’ve talked about first drafts and forward motion—just getting it done. That’s how I tend to write. I won’t worry about spelling or formatting and it’s really common for me to leave notes to myself about checking if this is correct and how that actually works. So at this point in the process… yeah, don’t worry about any of that stuff.

But this doesn’t mean I never worry about these things. It’s more a question of when I worry about them. Personally, I tend to clean most of this up in my second draft, and I’m usually still adjusting it in my third. Because these things matter. No, really, they do.

A lot of this is going to boil down to what I want to do with my writing. What are my end goals, so to speak. Is it my after-work cool down? A personal project? Maybe something I want to share on a Reddit thread or Wattpad. Am I going to self-publish it? Am I hoping a traditional press will pick this up?

Y’see Timmy, the truth is when I’m at home, the park, the office, the library, on the train, or wherever it is that I do most of my writing… I can do whatever I want. Seriously. When it’s just me and my keyboard, absolutely no rules apply. Whatever I want, however I want, for as long as I want. That’s my process, and nobody can say my process is wrong or weird or whatever.

But…

If I want to send something out into the world, to put it in front of other people’s eyes—especially people I’m hoping will give me money—I need to start seriously thinking about all of this stuff. That’s when I do need to worry about spelling. I definitely want to double check my grammar. And triple-check my facts. And if I’ve got a deadline, I absolutely need to be considering how much I’m writing and how often I’m writing. Because these things will matter to other people. They’ll matter to different degrees for different people, but they will matter.

And the more chances I give people to say “that’s wrong” are more chances they’re going to set my story aside and move on to something else.

So, yeah, write freely. Don’t be concerned about things. Just write.

But be aware we’re just deferring that concern till later. Not saying goodbye to it forever.

Next time…

Well, heck, like I was saying. Start of the year. new projects and new goals all around. Is there anything specific I could cover for anyone? Something that’s been gnawing at you, a topic where you’d really like some kind of advice or tips or encouragement? Let me know down in the comments and I’ll make that happen for you.

And until then… go write.

Okay, yes, I said I was only going to do this biweekly now but this is me posting for the third week in a row. I messed up my schedule/lost track of time because… look, life is a mess sometimes. And now I’m trying to play catch-up because some of these were planned to come out on certain days and I want to pretend this is still slightly relevant.

Point is, the ranty writing blog is still biweekly. Mostly. With only a few exceptions.

Anyway…

If you’ve been following along here for any amount of time, you know I’m a big believer in the rules of writing. Yes, there are rules. No, I don’t care what they said. There are rules and we have to learn them.

Now, granted, most of these rules are just in place to make sure we don’t end up in a metaphorical car crash before we’ve gotten any real experience. It’s like that driver ed instructor who screams at you to keep your hands at nine-and-three on the steering wheel. That’s a real thing. They’re not wrong to teach it and there’s reasons we need to learn it. But eventually we’re going to hit a point where we understand that a lot of the time we can relax a little bit while we’re driving. And that there are still absolutely times we want to keep two hands on the wheel.

One solid rule is spelling. Spelling’s important because that’s how we identify a word. If my readers can’t identify the word I’m using, they can’t understand what I’m trying to say. And if they can’t understand what I’m trying to say, well… It’s going to be tough to get them interested in what my characters are going through.

Of course, some folks will arrgue that spelling doesn’t really matter. I mean, really all those spellings were just made up anyway, right? Some random guy decided this was the right way to spell it and we all just went along with it. It’s not a rule. I don’t have to spell things that way. People wil figure out what I mean from context.

Maybe? Y’see, one of the other cool things spelling does is it lets us keep readign without any intruptions. Every time we notice a misspelled word, our brains sort of trip fir a moment. It might not completely knock us out of the story, but it breaks the flow a bit. And after the flow gets broken again and again… well, we’re not reading the stor yany more, we end up auditing it. Watching for the next typo to land

A solid follow up here is vocabulary in general. Sometimes I may know how to spell a ward, but I don’t actually know what it means. Other times I may know what it means, but I’m not entirely sure how to spell it… and maybe I’ve accidentally spilled something else instead.

You probably noticed both of these things in the past few paragraphs, didn’t you? Ha ha ha, he’s talking about spelling and he’s got typos. And that’s kind of my point. It knocked your brain out of reading mode. You were still working your way through the paragraphs, but it wasn’t a casual, gliding-along thing, was it? And that’s just here on a random blog post where I’m not really trying to draw you in. Imagine if you’d been trying to read a story?

Thank goodness for spellchecker, right?

Welllllllllll…

Here’s the problem. A spellchecker wouldn’t notice half the mistakes up above. I know, because I ran this post through mine. See, a spellchecker will notice a word that’s blatantly spelled wrong, but it won’t register a word that’s spelled correctly but being used wrong. For or fir? Ward or word? Spelling or spilling? A spellchecker doesn’t see a problem with any of these, so it doesn’t care which one I’m using.

But my reader? They’re going to notice. I mean, you noticed, right? Every one of those, ping, ping, ping

Well, that’s no problem, says random guy #23. I’ll just use one of those more advanced grammar programs, or maybe even an AI. They’ll understand the difference between a preposition and a noun. They’ll know the word I want.

Ha ha ha haa haaaaaa no they won’t. Sorry.

Kameron Hurley recently told a cute story on Bluesky about how she was looking through a blog about dentistry and the writer had capitalized the word tartar through several articles. When she asked why, the response was basically an internet shrug and “Grammarly told me to.” Because Grammarly can’t understand the difference between tartar (the build up on your teeth) and Tartar (an Asian ethnicity). This is a supposedly expert grammar program that doesn’t understand capitalization can drastically change the meaning of words. Which also should make you wonder about giving your Polish glassware a good polish, or that fine china you got in China.

Really, the more most of these assorted systems offer to do, the less they’re often capable of doing. I mean, heck, how many times have you gone looking for a specific book on Amazon and the algorithm instead recommends random Blu-rays? Or camping equipment? Or an anime t-shirt? None of these are bad things, but they’re definitely not what I asked the algorithm to find for me.

Again, spellcheck can’t solve all my spelling problems. A grammar program isn’t going to understand a lot of grammar situations. And this really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Human languages are complex, and English is one of the messiest, most confounding languages there is. Sometimes it’s hard for people to grasp subtext and nuance or even just basic meaning. So the idea that some guy threw together a machine that can understand all of that better than most people…?

Well, I mean, we’ve been talking about how they don’t. They just don’t. Sorry.

Let me be clear. I still use spellchecker all the time. But I’m not expecting it to do the work for me. It does help me catch the odd blatant misttake that crops us—and usually a lot faster than I could—but it also labels a lot of other things in my story as mistakes that aren’t. I still have to keep an eye on it and make sure it’s not screwing up. I don’t assume every correction or suggestion is right, and most of the time they aren’t.

Y’see, Timmy, too many folks get a result from a spellchecker or some half-baked LLM and they immediately accept it. It has to be right because… well, it’s a computer. It knows everything, right? That’s what decades of sci-fi has taught us. Computers are never wrong. Computers is geniuses.

This is why I need to know how to spell. I need to have a good vocabulary. Because ultimately, I’m the one who needs to be doing the writing if I want it to be my writing, saying what I want it to say.

As they said in the Princess Bride, anyone who says differently is spelling something.

Next time… well, crap, if I get back to biweekly posts, next time will be Halloween, so I guess we’ll talk about something scary. Or something we want to be scary, anyway.

Until then, go write.

About a year and a half ago, when the ranty writing blog was still out in the wild, I did a post about being a little cautious when I use made-up words in fiction. Y’know, words like cromulent or midichlorian or squale. In the comments, Oliver asked if the same would hold for real-world foreign languages as well. Should I be cautious using, say, Japanese words the same way I would be using Klingon technospeak?

Which is why I’d like to talk about paint.

I think we’re all familiar with the idea of slapping a quick coat of paint on something to make it look new or different, right? House flippers do it, painting rooms with the latest colors and shades. Not unheard of for a used car to get a fresh coat of paint on it either. Heck, if you’re familiar with Games Workshop, I’d guess 83% of their “new and different” armies are just a lot of the same models with different colored paint on them. Again, it’s not a new idea. It was blue, now it’s red. It was something we’d seen before and now it’s something cool and different and, y’know… red.

And sometimes… we do this with storytelling. It’s the same character, but now she’s a brunette instead of a blonde. It’s the same old capitalism, but now they’re credits instead of dollars. Same problems, but now he’s hooked on stimms instead of drugs. We slap on a quick coat of paint and whoa-ho! now it’s an alien future world with a different financial system and everything! Hey, those stimms are fifty credits each! Your Earth-dollars are no good here on our very different alien planet.

Now let’s talk about languages…

I want to be clear this is a “no easy answers” topic. Much like with completely fictional words, a lot of it’s going to depend on the story, my intended audience, and context. This isn’t something where I can say “only four foreign words per page and never do more than sixteen per chapter” and that answer will fit every scenario in every book by every other author. There’s just too many possibilities to cover.

There’s also that whole gray area of words I can feel relatively confident most people don’t think of as foreign-language words. Even here in the United States, where the majority of our paler citizenry famously only knows one language, most folks would understand words like bonjour, quesadilla, dosvidania, kaiju, aloha, or gesundheit. So should we be counting them? Do I need to explain what a quesadilla is? Or a kaiju?

Anyway, rather than give out any firm rules for how to do this, I’d like to offer you a couple of loose guidelines to keep in mind.

First off, why am I including these words? In a general sense, but also specifically this one and that one and those three on the last page. Am I trying to establish a setting or a character’s speech pattern? Or am I just slapping down that coat of paint to give my characters or setting a thin veneer of “otherness”? Yeah, look, we’re definitely in Cairo now– see, the guy said shookran instead of thanks.

I want it to be clear these words are necessary. They’re an integral, load-bearing part of the setting and the characters. And just in case you didn’t know… paint isn’t load-bearing.

Second, is it going to be clear to my readers what these words mean? Maybe not exactly crystal clear, but is there enough on the page, in context or subtext, for a reader to figure out this is a piece of clothing (maybe outerwear), that was her brother’s name, and that was an expletive (and definitely not one you’d use around your mother)? If there’s not enough there for my reader to understand it, is it going to get explained to them? And if they can’t figure it out and I’m not going to explain it… is it really a word I need?

There’s a bunch of ways to use words in my writing that my readers might not know. I want to remember that hitting an unknown, indecipherable word will break the flow of my story for a reader.

Also worth noting an important aspect of this—my chosen audience. We all want our books to be international best sellers with three or four million readers, but the truth is we’re probably going to be aiming at a specific group of people. Even if it’s just something like “sci-fi fans” or “religious thriller fans.” And hey– religious thriller fans might know a lot more Latin than the average reader. So I might not need as much context/explanation for some of those words.

Third, am I absolutely sure I’m using these words correctly? Look, languages are tricky, complex things. They all have their own subtleties and nuances and… look, this may come as a shock to you but Google Translate is not quite on par with the Federation’s universal translator. Especially now that they’ve plugged it into their half-assed AI. There are languages out there that do things English can’t even wrap its head around. Like, you may remember from high school that a lot of other languages have feminine and masculine verbs. Heck, y’know how English has singular and plural? Well, Arabic has dual. Yep, a whole way of dealing with verbs and nouns that’s specifically for two people. Spend a few minutes thinking how that changes how you write. And think. And if I’m using these words in the wrong way…

Or how about this–there are some words in English that have multiple meanings, but in other languages they’re actually multiple words. If you don’t know the difference, just looking up how to say this word in German could cause problems, he said, from personal experience. When I was writing The Broken Room, at one point in an earlier draft I’d unknowingly used the Spanish verb “shield” (as in, this lead vest will shield you from the X-rays) as opposed to the noun “shield” (the thing Captain America uses). Still can’t remember what made me check it again, but around the third draft I suddenly just had this weird, gnawing worry about it.

Anyway, those are my three personal rules-of-thumb for using other languages.

And I’ll leave you with this one other thing to consider. Benjamin Dreyer, reigning copy editor supreme at Penguin Random House (that’s his actual title) has suggested maybe we should stop italicizing foreign words. Italics generally mean emphasis, and we used to italicize words in other languages to highlight their difference. These weren’t normal words. They were Spanish words, words people used in some strange, different place.

We’re all past that, right? I mean, did any of you have a problem with aloha and gesundheit not being in italics up above? Maybe it’s time to admit words in another language are just… words.

Things to keep in mind when you write.

Speaking of which…

I haven’t had any suggestions or requests in a while now. I’m sure I can struggle on for a bit longer, coming up with ideas on my own. But if there’s something you’d like an answer to or some help with or just wondered what my thoughts were on a topic… please let me know in the comments. And if not, i guess next time I’ll just blather on about, I don’t know, creative writing classes I took in the past or something like that.

Until then, go write.