It's Time To Lose A Little Weight!

Yep! This is me today, as I trundle out of bed and head for my morning cup of coffee. I'm not really as frazzled as this picture displays, but I am feeling a little out of sorts.

You see... I've been on a diet for the last 6 weeks (my sister would rather hear me say: a lifestyle change), and while I can report I've officially lost 19 pounds, I'm feeling like I need to do some other changes also.

One of those places I need to change is in my writing habits. I need to put them on a diet, too. What's that? I can honestly answer that I don't know all the things to clean up my writing, but to start with, I need to look at brevity. How concise is my work? When I write, I tend to ramble and then have to go back and delete a sizable portion of was, just, but, as, and so on. I think you get the picture. In other words, I need to lose a little literary weight.

I recently read another book by Noah Lukeman, How To Write A Great Query Letter and one of the main points I got out of it was keeping to the point. Make your statement and move on. Don't belabor the issue by filling in the white spaces with unnecessary words. In a query letter it will get you rejected. In your stories and books it will cause them to be overweight, or carry a plethora of extraneous material.

Like I said, it's time to experience a lifestyle change and cut out the extra words. Be good to your work and treat it like it was a part of your body. Go on a diet and cut out the extra adverbs and see how beautiful your work becomes. It will be strong and powerful in its new body, carrying less baggage and more literary punch. And, you'll become that lean, mean writing machine that you've always admired in others.

Good luck on you diet! Let me know how you're doing!