One habit of mine I have learned about rather recently is that I use "just" a lot in my writing.
One of my bad habits (and I know I have a lot of them
)is that I always have people breathing:
Clark snorted.
Lois let out a long, slow breath.
Perry sighed.
As a result, I get not-so-cryptic messages from Gerry telling me: Quit having everyone breathe!
Uhh... Gerry, if everyone stops breathing, they'll die
. Of course, I know what she means. She means quit telling the reader that everyone is breathing - or at least, don't do it quite so often. After all, if they are still talking, they are obviously still breathing.
But it's as if when I write, 'Lois let out a long, slow breath,' what I'm really doing is giving the characters a break while I figure out what they are going to say next.
I have to go back through my stories before posting them and take out a lot of my references to breathing. Hopefully, I've mostly succeeded.
Probably shouldn't have told everyone that - now you're all going to be conscious of people breathing when you read my stories (if you weren't already)
.
ML
