Hoarders

So, yeah, I watch "Hoarders" on A&E.  It's a great way to give yourself a little extra incentive to do some spring (or fall) cleaning when you're not really geeked about it.

I mean, how can you look at this and not want to just do a quick vacuum job in the living room?

I was trying to come up with a post topic and the show just happened to come on. I thought there was no way I could link "Hoarders" to writing. . . but I did.

Bear with me, it makes sense, I swear.

The sickness of hoarding is where a person falls into the trap of not being able to let go of anything they own. It doesn't matter if it's broken, no good, out of date, or rotting. They're convinced it's worth something. They're positive they may need it at some point in the future and therefore they refuse to part with it. The end results are usually nice houses that are trashed into oblivion by the junk kept inside.

The moral of this story is NOT to let this happen to your manuscript! 

Sometimes we fall into the trap of not being able to properly edit our own stories because we're reluctant to throw away a single word we've written. If you've got a large word count and people are telling you it needs to be cut -- trust me, you can cut it.

Don't. Be. A. Word. Hoarder!!

Here's a terrific post I stumbled across when I was seriously editing my ms about to go to querying (for real this time) and it helped me recognize a lot of my own word hoarding. If you're looking for a way to tighten your writing even more give it a look-see.

Being a Word Hoarder is nothing to be ashamed of. Not doing something about it, is. Don't let your story end up looking like this.

This has been my public service announcement for the week.