Lucid Writing Advice VI

See how better it flows? I even left the word count just the same, and yet it moves faster. Below is an example of jargon, the kind where a character says something he might not ever say:

Tom and Justin wandered around to the right side of the control board. Ahead them, surrounded by towers of steel and iron, a rocket smoked as it waited to be launched. With a sigh, Tom looked to his five year-old brother.

Seems like little Justin has the brain of a rocket scientist, and at just five years old. It’s pretty obvious that Tom was thinking the same thing when he scratched his head. If you give us no reason why Justin would suddenly talk like that, then don’t do it. Most writers will use this kind of writing to get themselves out of something they can’t find a way out of.

A good way that I would have fixed this is to introduce a character at this point in the story who knows about how to launch rocket. Like Tom, I wouldn’t put my life in the hands of my five year old brother-if I had one.

A cliché is a word or group of words that have been used so often, too often, that they lose the once powerful thrust they did have. ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ is a cliché that just doesn’t amuse anyone anymore, at one time it did. Can you imagine?

Here is a clinched passage:

The storm raged out of control. Across the mountains a herd of buffalo thundered down in anger. A fire suddenly blazed before them, and burned them all alive.

Note these words: raged, thundered, anger, and blazed. Those words are sitting in that passage and it makes this writer’s appear to be doing just that...sitting. Not every storm rages unless it’s a very big one; how big was that herd of buffalo coming down the mountain; and did the fire just to that, blaze?

This writer has written words that the reader commonly associate with life, but couldn’t the writer added his own imaginative boost?

Here’s that passage rewritten without words that have been overused.

It was only a second of time before the rains started to fall without mercy. Across a mountain in the distance, a herd of two thousand buffalo clambered down the steep slopes. A blinding shaft of lighting connected ground and sky together in an inkling of time. A fire erupted into a seething, uncontrollable mass of flickering orange light.

That’s sound better because I have tidied up the words, and have done away with ones you would have expected.

Don’t you agree?