word frequency: how often should you be "allowed" to use a word in your book?

If You suspect you've used a particular noticeable word too many times in a story . . . . . .

You have used that particular noticeable word too many times in the story. It's a guarantee that if you, dear writer, have noticed it, that readers will notice it also.

caw

Regards the F-bomb: Context is everything. My bestest unpublishable novel is set among soldiers in the Vietnam War, and the word in various conjugations gets used a lot. I'm not about to enumerate.

My next bestest nearly completed unpublishable novel is set in the mid-19th century in frontier USA. Nary once does this word appear in the story, because it wasn't used as an epithet back then.

caw

When I was a boy (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away), one of life's guilty pleasures was watching the Dukes of Hazzard. Yeah, yeah, (or should that be yeehah?) I know, I know. But the hormones my friends were blowing in the wind.

And the bit that we all liked (well, apart from ...) was when the General Lee did one of its famous jumps and they sounded the horn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAKksqKR3pI&feature=kp

In the playgrounds of Worksop, north Nottinghamshire, this caused two arguments. The first, naturally, was whether the car could possibly survive a jump like that or it would just write off yet another of the hundreds of stunt cars they killed.

The second argument was about whether they should use the horn more often. One school of thought was that "if I had a cool horn like that, I'd be blowing it all the time." The people championing the "aye" side of this argument generally bought Ford Capris when they got their first wage packet, installed an aftermarket horn kit which sounded vaguely like Dixie (or Dixie with a northern UK accent) and then proceeded to play said horn at every opportunity. To the delight and amusement of all their neighbours.

Which more or less proved the point for those of us on the nay side of the argument. You most certainly can have too much of a good thing. And you can play the General Lee's horn too often. Which, admittedly, would be just once for some people.

Perhaps the rule is the more ... ahem ... noisy the word the less we should use it?

noraline said:

Hello, fellow writers!! So, I am currently on the last stretch of my first novel WIP (currently at 50k words!) and while I haven't really started editing yet, I have combed back through older chapters for "clean-ups", or so have you.

I've found that certain words come up a lot, not memorable ones, or entire phrases, but words like "eyes" and "moon", that aren't articles or necessities. So, how much should a word be "limited" in a novel? I don't want to overuse something until it has no meaning left to give! So, what are your thoughts?

Click to expand...

take them out if they don't mean anything important to the story, if you want. or find a different phrase or word to use instead.

I have more trouble with words like: even, though, however, but....and so on. I'm pretty wordy.