When I first started writing, I did a terrible job with the two topics of this post: echoing and character names. This is a problem I see in many young writers as well as some older, inexperienced writers like I was a few years ago.

Echoing is the use of words multiple times. Now, if you look at the paragraph above, I used as twice, I used I three times, writers twice; this is what I mean by echoing. Sometimes, it’s okay, sometimes I do it on purpose, to emphasize something, but sometimes it’s just bad. With the paragraph above, echoing words like as is not such a terrible thing. As is a construction word, and the reader will many times see it as invisible, like using said frequently in a chapter. There are other reasons why having said in your story is bad, and I’ll talk about that when I do a post about dialogue. But when you look back at the first paragraph agai

n, writers being used twice and close together is bad. It can distract the reader and cause them to disengage from your story, and when a reader disengages, there’s always a risk they’ll put down your story. Remember the second half of rule #4: Never give the reader a reason to put your book down!

So it is very important to watch out for echoing in your stories. The way I find it is to read my chapters, out loud. When you are saying the words, you will instantly identify where you are echoing and will know where you need to come up with a new word.

You’re probably wondering about why this tip is also about character names. I’ve found the names of your characters can be very repetitive. I find myself distracted by having the character’s name appear multiple times in a paragraph or a chapter. Sometimes, the multiple repeated names cause me to start counting the number of times they appear on the page. Am I distracted? YES!

Some authors don’t care about this, but I focus a lot of attending on avoiding this type of echoing, but to me, it’s important to me. So when I create my characters, and I come up with my character names (you can see a video about character names here: https://youtu.be/UmEknq4QnWM or go to the writing tutorials page) so that alternate naming methods are available. Below are some of the names from my newest series, The Wither War.

• Watcher: he’s a wizard, so I can call him young wizard, or young boy.
• Mirthrandos: She is an old wizard. I can call her Mira, or ancient wizard, or old woman.
• Er-Lan: I can use his name or call him zombie. I don’t like calling him a monster because he is a good guy.
• Cutter: He’s really big and strong, so I call him big NPC, or big villager, or huge warrior.
• Krael: he’s the bad guy. I can call him wither king, or king of the withers, or wither.
• Kora: She’s Krael’s wife. I can call here wither, or his wife if both are in the scene, or wither but I must be careful, calling her wither when there are other withers in the scene would be confusing.

So when you look through Chapter 11, link below, hopefully, you see where I changed the name of the character, either in the dialogue or in the action, to eliminate some of the echoing.

Now there’s also echoing in descriptions, for example, there’s some echoing in the following sentence.

The ocean seemed to sparkle as the light of the moon reflected off the ocean’s surface.

Obviously, ocean is what’s echoing. Instead, I might write this:

The ocean seemed to sparkle as the light of the moon reflected off the rippling surface.

Because it’s all in one sentence, the reader will know that rippling surface is referring to the ocean.

Now, I used to have the problem of using the word look too much; I’d echo all over the place with it: He looked over the fence. The zombie had a strange look on their face. The goat looked like it was going to attack. When you read these sentences, I bet you are distracted by that word. My editor is always pointing this out to me, and I’m always looking (oops, there I go again, let me start again.) I’m always searching for ways to replace that word. I use the thesaurus in MS Word to help me, and I’ve made lists of words that I stick on the wall, to remind me to avoid these words. But even with all those reminders, I still mess it up. A teacher in Nebraska, Kristi Holl, taught me about wordclouds, something I had never learned. If you go here: https://www.wordclouds.com/, and paste your story into the generator and then let it think, it will give you a graphical representation of what your echoing and word use.

Here’s the word cloud for chapter 11:

You can see I overcompensated when I tried to eliminate looked and used glanced too many times. Now, in my defense, I just finished this chapter and it hasn’t gone through the many rewrites that I always do; I would have caught this before I sent it to the editor, hopefully. Also, notice that I used Blaster’s name enough in this chapter that it showed up on the wordcloud. Maybe he had a lot of dialogue, maybe he had a lot of action; you read through the story below and decide if it’s okay or not.

 

You can also get the word list, showing the frequency of your words. You can see the word list for chapter 11, to the right. I’m not sure why Watcher didn’t show up on the word cloud???

I hope this lesson on Echoing was valuable. I still struggle with it and find some echoing always sneaks past me and makes it into print, but I think I’m getting better. I’m hoping, when you read chapter 11, you’ll see places where I tried to avoid the echoing and

places where I did a poor job. To fix this in your writing, the first thing you need to do is be aware of it as a problem, then start looking for it in other people’s writing, and of course look for it in yours as well. Read your story out loud, and you’ll identify many places where you can improve.

Keep writing and watch out for creepers.

Mark (Monkeypants_271)