Welcome to Week 4 of the MFRW blog challenge. Blogging is an opportunity for authors to connect with readers. Despite being fiction writers, blogging is an entirely different style of writing and often stumps us. Our challenge is designed to help our authors blog consistently, thoughtfully and with purpose. Anyone can join at any point in the challenge… FOLLOW THIS LINK TO LEARN MORE AND JOIN THE CHALLENGE.

This week’s prompt is “Sorry Editor! My Common Writing Mistakes”.

Hm, what are my common writing mistakes?

Well, one of them is using the same words and/or actions over and over and over. We have a running joke in my critique group about what the word of the week was, the one that appeared more often than needed.

Apparently, the word that is my favorite word. Even more than very. I can’t believe how many times I use that in a manuscript. Some can be easily deleted without changing the meaning of a sentence, but sometimes I find myself rewriting in hopes of finding another way to express myself that doesn’t involve a that or two.

And then there’s the same action over and over, and we see this in a lot of books. How many times can the hero run his hand through his hair? How often can the heroine let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding. How many times can the hero cup the heroine’s head before the reader wants to throw the book across the room? How many ways are there to describe a kiss? Two pairs of lips coming together. Well, if you write romance, there had better be an infinite number of ways to describe kissing. And other intimate encounters.

I write pretty clean, so grammar and spelling isn’t much of an issue for me. I start with dialogue, and sometimes end up with a page of “talking heads” with lots of white space but not much action, emotion or inner thought interspersed. My critique group points out when I’ve rushed through a scene like that. (And there’s another that!)

To learn more about other common writing mistakes, click on the linky list below.

Linda