I got up to 80,000 words on my current novel back in March or April. Since then I’ve been trying to turn this great mass of verbiage into a proper story with a likeable protagonist and an entertaining problem to solve … it turned out that I had written a lot but failed on those counts. Even I didn’t like my passive heroine. Or understand her for that matter.

I looked back to last year and realized that I spent a lot of time in the winter and spring writing two short stories, one around eight thousand words and another with five or six thousand. It was a change of pace trying to write for some anthology calls and staying inside their word limit. At one point in the first story, to get under the magic eight thousand I started cutting the word “the” whenever I could. That wasn’t quite the right mindset.

They say (whoever they are) that every word has to count. The problem as a newbie is that I don’t always know which word is the important one. This matters in my current situation because I invented a world, a setting, for my book. The action takes place in a ‘real’ Catholic elementary school. It’s not science fiction or fantasy. However, just like sci-fi, the world-building is vitally important but it isn’t the story. I need the mental imagery, so I put an entire description of the school into the manuscript. Two different people told me politely that such a detailed description of the building was boring. And it is. I went back and read it and fell asleep myself. When my characters run around the building I need to ensure that they are consistent but . … that should be invisible to the reader.

Anyway, I’ve been cutting and redoing and cutting and redoing. I summarized a LOT of dialogue which is a total mistake in this kind of book. At the same time, there are people, never seen again, who say relatively important things. The rule, I have discovered, is that they don’t get names. In trying to understand how this is done, I found a passage in an Emma Lathen murder mystery where a police detective is interviewing people in a bar. One is a regular, another is a small bald man making circles with his glass, and the last one is large and soft. Each character gets two comments between the detective’s statements, the first with a dialogue tag, and the second without. Hmm.

SUPER Rabbit Hole! I put the word “word” into an online thesaurus and got “the Italian word for ham”. (My brain did a complete freeze.) That seemed ridiculous so I had to check. Google’s direct translation of “ham” to Italian is “prosciutto” or occasionally “pancetta” which is what I thought more or less. The Italian word for “word” is “parola” which makes more sense.

The text below is the entry from the thesaurus. Putting it in the blog stripped the style from it and I haven’t been totally successful at restoring it. Of course, what the entry was supposed to be was an example, that used “word” in a sentence. My brain slowly unfreezes.

word
noun
1 the Italian word for “ham”. term, name, expression, designation, locution; turn of phrase, idiom; formal appellation; rare vocable.
2 (usually words) his grandfather’s words had been meant kindly. remark, comment, statement, utterance, observation, pronouncement, declaration