I’m doing a lot of research lately on Expletives. I thought – like everyone else does – that expletives are curse words. Well, curse words are expletives, but that’s not the definition.
Expletives are words that add nothing to the sentence, and serve nothing more than to divert focus and delay the eventual completion of the thought.
This isn’t something you really want in writing!
One of the first things I had to grasp in writing was to complete the thought.
Now my attention in writing has turned to “completing the thought in as few words as possible.”
Starting a sentence with the word “So” is an expletive. What does it add? Nothing. What damage does it do? it delays completing the thought.
“So, there I was, 14,000 feet, one engine out…”
That sentence – so famous among pilots – is loaded with expletives.
Let’s state it the way it should be for a novel or a movie.
“14,000 feet in a night sky. The ground was missing, shrouded in the darkness that enveloped the plane. The only lights were the instrument panels and the flames licking out of my port engine…”
The first example puts the emphasis on how high the airplane is flying. The second one puts the emphasis on the pilot and his situation.
Writing movie scripts has taught me the incredible need to be parsimonious with my words, and to jump to an active verb as quickly as possible.
Avoid expletives. If you train yourself to look for them and remove in the edit phase, you very quickly develop the mindset of avoiding them while writing.
Get to the point, and keep the reader there, for the rest of the novel
