The Word List

Let's add the word "Was" to the list of words CW should never use ever again.

Seriously. One of my favorite tools is yWriter (Over here) because it organizes things really well and it has a word-use list that shows you every word used in the manuscript, and how frequently you use them.

My biggest problem is the "was doing" pairing. Was thinking, was writing, was hurting, was aching, was growing, ect. ect. 99.99999% of the time this should be replaced with "did": Wrote, hurt, ache, grew/grow ect. I finally got fed up trying to find every example of this and just put "was" into "find" so I could look for every example of lazy-ass filter-word writing.

FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY TWO TIMES. FOUR. HUNDRED. AND. THIRTY. TWO. WASES. 

Wass.

Was's? Damn it, what's the plural for was?

I've already knocked out my "feels" "probablys" "Somethings" and "seems". This one is especially hard because you need the word was. Probably I cut down from twenty to just five because "probably" usually indicates an unwillingness to commit a character to a word, action or assumption, and most of the time you can kill that with no sweat. But it's hard to decide if your "was" is a good "Was" or a bad "was". Passive voice was? Bad. Descriptive was? Um. Let me get back to you on that.

Still: Make a list of words you use as crutches, and do a "Find" when you've got the story itself in working order. Fix every example that needs to be fixed.

It will take forever, but it will help you out bunches.