She sighed. He sighed. They sighed. Enough with all the sighing!!
I’m almost finished with my third manuscript and I can’t believe how many times I have my main character sighing. It’s almost like she’s breathing sighs–with every breath another sigh escapes. Boy, am I thankful for re-writes.
I think I had her sighing so much to speed the story up, and to show how irritated she was. But not only did I slow the story down, I underestimated my readers. Will they understand that she is irritated without her sighing? I think so.
Truth be told, it’s just plain laziness on my part by having her sigh so much. I could have showed her irritation in other ways, but I took the easy way out and added the dreaded sigh. We’ve all heard how we need to show versus tell in our story, but how do we do that without falling on the tried and true–in my case, the sigh?
More on that in tomorrow’s post. What do you guys think of overusing the sigh in our stories? Are there other words that you are addicted to?
(I’ve sighed a total of 14 times in this post. Total addiction.)
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