Look, Stare, Peer, Gaze, Gape. Turn Those Eyes.

I am working through my 110,000 word manuscript, trying to beef up my verbs and eliminate excess adjectives and adverbs like I did with the first page after reading the adjective/adverb chapter in “The First Five Pages” by Lukeman. It feels like this edit is taking forever–but that could be because I keep letting my mind wander off to check email, poke friends on Facebook and make some more tea.

Or it could be that I have to use my thesaurus a lot more. One of the exercises that Lukeman suggested was to take all the verbs out of your first page. Then look at your list and replace some of them with stronger ones and that sort of thing. And I noticed that I use the word ‘look’ an awful lot. Okay, not an awful lot, but maybe over the whole manuscript, a bit excessively.

Therefore, I am spending my time finding synonyms for ‘look’ as well as ways to work around everyone looking at each other all the time. It’s kind of fun. But then again, I am only halfway through the manuscript. I may think differently in a day or two.