So, over at fictionscribe, I offered up my first 200 words to be sliced and diced as they rightly deserved to be. I was amazed at the...tameness of the comments. Yes, I got rightly lambasted for my overuse of "THAT" and the fact THAT my second character's name remained unknown for the 200 words, and yes I've been writing the damn thing for years, but I express my surprise. As I had known more or less when it was going to be posted up there, I got into the habit of (even while at home over Easter) checking the blog as frequently as I could to see if she had posted and commented on it yet. As it turned out, no such luck until Monday, which was more or less what I had expected anyway. Still, it is always a pleasant surprise when you think you are throwing something to the wolves and instead of it being ripped to shreds, comes back with just a hole ripped in the knee of its faded jeans.
Anyway, as soon as I read the comments for the excerpt, I did as suggested, and went to my current version of the novel from hell, did a find and replace for the word "THAT", and came up with a staggering 305 "THAT"'s. I know some of them are probably useful - the word does exist for a reason, but 305/12,711 = (according to my calculator) 0.239 = 2.39%! Nearly 2.5% of my story is THAT. And THAT has given me something else to torture myself over. Not only do I have to WRITE the damned thing, I have to worry about my tragic overuse of a certain word. More than THAT, I have to worry about having another THAT word THAT takes up another 2.5%, or another, or another, to perpetuity. And THAT, ladies and gents, is why I have been working on this wreck of a novel for nearly 6 years. Yes, we must be coming up on the 6th within the next couple of months. Perhaps I should burn an old copy of it to celebrate (or hell, the new copy, for all the good it's doing sitting open on my computer right now...stop trying to make me feel guilty, damn it!)
In spite of the very good advice given to me in reducing my THAT's (and yes, it IS something THAT I will take notice of, in the editing stage), for the sake of my sanity, and it's fragile enough as it is, I'm just going to tuck it away in the back of my head and only bring it out when the novel from hell is back in an editing stage. Theoretically, THAT will happen around a month after the hell known as university concludes for the semester. Then I will spend the summer torturing myself with it, and have something to send out when I should be going to class next fall.
I recall THAT, when writing my hook for the last Miss Snark Crapometer, I noticed my extraneous use of THAT. I suspect it is a problem many people face without even knowing they do it (agree with me here for my sanity). However, in Russian (yep, I'm a dork learning Russian), you have to use the word THAT, you can't omit it as you can in English in many instances. So maybe it's just THAT has become such a filler word and we need to prune down on its use.
I just copied and posted this into MSWord and had it capitalize all my uses of the word THAT and it made me laugh to see how many of them there were.
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