Handy Lists for Writers

And Others Who Like Lists (Literally Everyone)

No one is surprised to encounter an article about lists on here. I love lists, as I have said plenty of times before. This is a holiday week so I’m phoning it in. Nobody cares when I phone it in, and in fact, statistics show that people like the articles I phone in better than the ones I put real thought into. The analytics provide very good information about the value of my real thoughts. I’d phone it in every day if I could but I try to space these out. This is an article I’ve had in the hopper for awhile, adding stuff to it from time to time, and today is finally its day in the sun.

I love making lists. I have paper notebooks full of lists, OneNote notebooks and Evernote notes full of lists, and my computer desktop is covered with hastily created text files (New Text Document through New Text Document (11)) full of lists. My phone also has several apps loaded that I use to make lists. I make lists of all kinds of stuff; it is a skill passed down through generations of family members with untreated anxiety issues. 

Here is a list pro tip: When you start a to-do list, the first item on your to-do list should be “Make To-Do List” so as soon as your list has three or four items on it you will have accomplished something and you can check or cross off the first thing. This will give you some momentum to get other items crossed off. You can stop reading now, that was the valuable advice for today.

For this low-hanging-fruit article, I have gone through my notebooks and files and pulled together the most useful lists that pertain to writing specifically. These are ongoing lists I add to periodically; sometimes I also make lists right when starting a new writing project, but I’ll cover those lists some other time. If you keep a writing notebook or journal of any kind, whether digital or analog, the lists included here are worthy additions that you’ll turn to again and again when you work on your writing—or at least I do.

Concordance of Words to Do Without

Something about language that really interests me is how an individual person’s language choices and patterns subtly change over the course of my acquaintance with them. People have their favorite words and go-to catch phrases and if you listen carefully to the people you speak with often you’ll notice that most people pick up new words and phrases when they encounter a new linguistic influence like a new person in their life that they spend a lot of time with or even sometimes if they get into a subculture or fandom they pick up language from that.

Part of my job when I copyedit a manuscript is making sure authors don’t inadvertently reuse words or phrases that will stand out to readers. (If characters have favorite words and phrases they use regularly in dialogue or their thoughts, that’s intentional and not on the chopping block.) Looking out for these when I edit has trained me to notice them in speech, too.

That’s made me aware that I must be doing this too, although it’s harder to notice yourself doing anything than it is to notice other people doing things. I know I also have phrases I’m overdependent upon and words I over use. I try to pay attention to what these are and notice them as much as I can so I can try to avoid overuse. 

When I notice one, I put it on this list. Once I feel I’ve successfully broken a habit of using a word or phrase too much, I take it off the list, so the list never grows too long for the way I use it. Before sitting down to write, I take a quick look  through that note to remind myself that I use these words a lot and I need to use them intentionally, if at all.

I think those who write as much as I do may also notice their own pet words and phrases, but if not, you can always ask the people who talk to often or the people who read your work if they could point them out to you.

Words To Use

The opposite of the previous list: This is the list of the words I read or hear, or that just come to mind, that I like and want to remember to use in my writing. When I hear a cool word or phrase like that, I put it on the list. Just the act of writing or typing them kind of cements them in my mind so they’re more likely to get used organically when I’m drafting something and I go reaching for a better word.

This list is also handy to review before I sit down and do a line edit of something I’ve written. That’s the stage of editing where I’ve worked out the major issues and now I’m going through every sentence one by one and finetuning them to make sure they’re as aesthetically pleasing and as loaded with nuanced meaning as possible.

Sometimes reading over my list of fun words or phrases inspires entire story ideas that spring from thinking about definitions, etymology, and ironic, informal, or slang use of the terms. I never take anything off this list but I add to it regularly. I look back over the old entries from time to time to see if they can spark a new idea.

Cool Names for People and Stuff

I have color-coded journal pages that I use to keep track of names. If you write fiction you need names for people, at the very least. You probably also need names for pets. For coffee shops. For corporate-owned big-box megamarts and indie coffee shops. Names for cities and religions and species of animal and makes of automobile and spacecraft and celebrities and everything else. You’re gonna need a lot of names. More names than you think. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, I learned this week, has 2,782 distinct named characters. A lot of them had only one name (like Sulin) but then a lot of them also had three names (like Lews Therin Telamon) so this probably averages out to like 4,000 names he had to come up with.

You need more names. Start collecting them now.

Whenever I hear a name I like—an unusual one that I don’t come across every day—I write it on one of these pages. Likewise when I hear a word that I think would make a good name for a place or a thing. The pages are split among broad categories like “Realistic” and “High Fantasy” and “Science Fiction-y” and “Historical” and then within each category I color-code names such that, for instance, names for people are highlighted yellow, names for places are highlighted blue, and names for things are highlighted red.

When I am drafting, I never spend more than a few seconds coming up with a name for someone or something. I can always change the name later. If I need an everyday kind of name I just pick one off the top of my head and if I need a more unusual name I go to my list. I never stop typing my draft to contemplate the nature and meaning of a name. If I can’t think of one in a few seconds off the top of my head or I can’t immediately spot something appropriate on the list I just do a cat-on-keyboard maneuver—“Dfohaew” okay buddy that’s your name now until I think of something better when I’m not busy drafting text. 

Project Ideas

I’ve talked about ideas and generating new ones plenty of times. I’ve talked about how I save every creative idea, however unfleshed or unviable, in case it is of use later. Other people who have also been writing for awhile tell me their problem is too many ideas rather than too few. Once your mind is in the mode of generating new ideas on the fly and  recognizing nuggets of viable ideas in the wild when you see or hear them, it’s harder to turn the idea tap off than on.

Not every idea you come up with will be viable as a complete story base, and that’s okay. Sometimes what happens is I’m driving and I think of an idea, it just flits right past my mind, so I take a voice note and later when I transcribe it I realize “oh that will never be enough for a full story” but there’s often another idea somewhere in the idea bucker that’s also only half of what I need to make a story and when I put them together I have a full concept. That’s why it’s important to save all of them, even if after a few seconds of thought you’re like “oh nah that could never be a story.”

I write these down without fail. They’re in list format in a way, in that each “idea” is the title of a document in a folder. The file inventory is my list. When I think of something that adds to or enriches the idea, that thought goes into the document. When something gets used, the document gets moved out of the idea bucket and into its own folder. Get in the habit of adding ideas to this list willy-nilly, then sort your list out every now and again.

Filter Words

I don’t know who else has such a problem with filter words. Maybe it’s only me. Maybe I’m the only person who needs this list. The filter words list is topically adjacent to the concordance of words I use too much and need to use less, because I pepper all my writing with filter words and then don’t notice I’ve done it until I really squint my eyes at it and go in for the nuts and bolts rework.

A filter word is any word that puts distance between the narrator and the reader, for instance:

I saw a blue car parked across the street.

The filter word in this case is “saw.” The narrator is telling you they saw something. The fact of the blue car comes to the reader filtered through the narrator’s perception. Better as:

There was a blue car parked across the street.

I’m not doing a whole thing on filter words right now but, briefly, that’s what they are. There are tons and tons of them and somehow I’m always finding new ones to clutter up my text with so I have a list of the ones I catch myself using the most on a separate list from my other overused words.

If filter words aren’t your problem but some other category of word is—like -ly adverbs if you’re trying to get better about using verbs, or qualifiers if you need your writing to be more authoritative—then make a list of the words in that category that you use often and want to reduce. Reviewing the list before writing will remind you to use them sparingly and carefully. 

Okay I hope you enjoyed some phoned-in garbage. Coming up later this week, another trope article but with a twist. Check back Thursday for the tropes I love and would like to see more of.

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