I Noticed that I Heard so I Turned and I Saw

I don't like 'seems'. For example, "She seemed angry." Well, is she or isn't she? WHY does she seem angry? What gives this impression? Her expression? Her words? Her body language? Then show me those, rather than merely telling me she 'seems' angry.

My characters 'turn to face' other characters way too much. I'm going to have a major headache when it finally comes time to wear down the red pencil--possibly all four of them--on my manuscript, because I'll be busy trying to find new ways of saying, "Such-and-such turned to face So-and-so".

Ugh!

Penguin Queen said:

etc. I think I do that because when I read something like that & it's not done really well (with characterisation in the dialogue) I get lost immediately & have to count off whose turn to speak it is.

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I think for me the max is about six lines, depending on the length of them. Then I have to go back and count off, "Mark, Jane, Mark, Jane, Mark, Jane, okay, this one's Mark."

But for the most part, extraneous tags are unnecessary.

[FONT=&quot]Wolf met us at the door. “You look like crap. What happened?”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]“Had the shit beat out of me.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]“What’s the other guy look like?”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]“A corpse.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]“Good.”[/FONT]

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was

We had a member of my critique group who hated was, would circle each one on the page and lecture the evils of suing "was" as passive, weak, telling, etc. One per page was an acceptable standard. Dickens wouldn't have made it in that group.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Michael Murphy
Suspense is just a click away...
www.mjmurphy.com

I noticed a lot of unnecessary pronouns in my final edit. My ms is also first person, and for some reason I kept writing "He held out his hand to me." And "we locked eyes with each other." Knocked off the "to me" and "with each other" and I had a much tighter ms.

What a nasty habit. Not sure how I fell into that.