A sizeable portion of the work that I do is dependent upon one key: the Delete key. The purging of unnecessary, redundant, and repetitious words is one of the easiest steps toward crisper, more powerful writing.
We can often be blind to the padding that creeps into our prose. For instance, we may have a detail in mind, or a clue, and the significance it holds for us results in mention after mention, leaving the reader wondering why we, the author, don’t simply trust them to remember. Authors themselves can forget as the page count rises, and details that were provided before unknowingly reappear three and six and nine chapters later. Or, in an effort to ensure absolute clarity in a sentence, we instead bloat and weaken it.
One of the simplest examples of redundancy I commonly see occurs with the intended clarification of action verbs. “Stood up.” “Raced up to.” “Knelt down.” At the risk of bluntness, how often have we knelt up? Stood down (the easing of readiness aside)? In isolation, the need for these prepositions seems ridiculous, but they can so naturally materialize in our writing without realization, particularly with newer writers eager to add impact to the action. Little can do more to increase impact, though, than brevity. So, “he stood.” “She raced to.” “Mark knelt.”
Adverbs are often a source of redundancy. Take, for example, the following (from a story I recently edited): “Thomas squirms a little uncomfortably.” The very definition of “squirm,” according to Oxford, includes the display of discomfort. Why not, then, “Thomas squirms”? Rare is the reader that will attribute a sense of comfort to that verb.
Or, the following (copied verbatim from the original text): “She has mousy straw colored hair hanging down partially obscuring a manly looking, square face.” The first issue is one of contradiction. “Mousy” implies grayish brown, “straw colored” is light yellow. Then, there’s “hanging down partially obscuring …” If hair is obscuring a person’s face, it is doing so by hanging down. The example sentence could easily, and more impactfully, be rewritten as “She has mousy (or straw-colored; note the necessary hyphen in this case) hair partially obscuring a manly looking, square face.” Argument could be made that “square” is unnecessary when preceded by “manly looking,” but I try to abstain from stereotyping.
Repetition can often occur pages apart. The following sentences were pulled from the same work as the previous example, with noted page occurrences. (Punctuation as originally written.)
Page 2: “Her shoulders are broad and masculine and she doesn’t seem to have any breasts or curve to her waist at all.”
Page 3: “As she does this [standing], her breasts become very evident and I can see a very feminine curve to her waist and a slight blush to her cheek.”
Page 6–7: “She has a narrow waist leading to a graceful curve shaping her breasts. Her shoulders are well muscled and slightly masculine supporting a graceful neck and solid jaw.”
Now, there is helpful contradiction that occurs between the first and second sentence: an initial impression is overturned when the character in question presents a different profile. When the third sentence is added, though, the repetition becomes clear. Page 2 told the reader that her shoulders were “masculine”—a feature that was not corrected by Page 3—and Page 6–7 reminds the reader yet again. Both Page 2 and Page 6–7 demand that the reader take notice of her waist. And her breasts? Well…. In Page 3, both independent clauses use “very” as an amplifier. In Page 6–7, we have the repetition of “graceful.”
First impressions (Page 2) can certainly be corrected (Page 3), but the reader begins to lose faith when given a “first” impression yet again (Page 6–7).
Here is another example. In one story I edited, since published, cash exists solely as the illicit currency of the criminal underground. It’s an important fact. But let’s look at how often that fact popped up. (Sentences and pages as written in the original first draft.)
Page 25: “The world had run on digital currencies for many years. Cash meant this guy was involved in the black market, buying or selling something in the underbelly of the city.”
Page 26: “That a police officer readily accepted cash, the currency of the black market, was telling.
Page 47: “Paper money, the currency of the black market and criminal underworld in [city name] wasn’t hard to find …”
Page 56: “’Where in the hell did you get that?’ Mike asked. Paper money was illegal in [city name] and was only used in the black market.
In the final draft, the first sentence was kept essentially the same. The remaining three were all edited.
Page 26: “The officer at the front desk had taken his cash so quickly and casually that Terry could tell bribes were a regular thing here.”
Page 47: “Paper money wasn’t hard to find …”
Page 56: “’That shit’s illegal. Where the hell did you get it?’ Mike asked.”
It can be a stylistic choice to use these types of repetition. But when writers are seeking impact and conciseness to their manuscript—when they want to say as much as possible with as few words as possible—these are often the most common opportunities that I can highlight. And writers, we need to trust readers. Trust them to remember. Unless a fact or detail is truly important to the plot reveal or twist yet to occur, say it once. Repetition implies significance, and when that significance fails to materialize, readers are left insulted or beaten down by the details, rather than swept away by the narrative that truly matters.