Good Saturday afternoon! It’s hard to believe that Christmas has come and gone. With everything this year has brought, we needed that reminder of good friends and family love. Now, on to the clearing out of the uneaten Christmas treats and cleaning up the decorations.

This year I’m clearing out some old decorations that haven’t been used in years. As my hubby says, I’m purging. He’s glad because it makes the Christmas bins lighter for him and our son to haul back up to the attic. But what about our everyday things? Do we need to do some clearing out and cleaning up there too?

What do I mean you might be saying? Well, as I sat around with family and friends during Christmas, I thought about all of the things that we have that are not even used. There are so many what not’s just lying around, collecting dust. So, I’ve decided to clear some out and make room for some minimalism.

And what about our writing. Should we go through our works and clean out some unnecessary words? It’s so hard sometimes to get just 50k words down, but to think about clearing some of those out just makes a writer’s head hurt. I’m not talking about the meat of the story or the descriptions that help to carry the reader into another time or place. I’m talking about the unnecessary filler words. Or as I like to call them, fluff.

Now, all writers have a tendancy to use too many fluff words. It’s those words that add some extra words to the count. They don’t need to be there to make the story work, but they are just there to up the word count. Why not just clean them up, clear them out, and let the manuscript breathe without all of that added weight.

You will be surprised at how much better it sounds once you get rid of the fluff. I’ve done some fluff removing lately and the wording actually zips along without hinderance.

As always, Good writing and May God Bless You…