I'm back!
I'd like to say I've been super busy with all kinds of interesting hobbies or requests for my expertise that have eaten up all my time to blog, but I can't say that, so I won't.
So instead I'm going to confide something to you that has troubled me for a while now.
I was overwhelmed this morning by an insidious foe that has haunted me for years. I've spent my writing life running from it. I hide when I feel it stalk closer. I close my eyes and hope that helps.
It usually does.
Who is this fiend? My nemesis, the verb "flew".
I'm tired of hiding my eyes from it, so now I'm taking a stand. I'm here to say that 'flew' is done as a verb, unless you're writing about geese.
No more "my eyes flew across the letter..." I mean, how creepy is that? Think of the image. Ew. The same goes for "fingers flying across a keyboard..." yuck. No amount of bleach can erase that image from my head when I read that.
And I'm tired of people "flying down the stairs," isn't 'falling' more appropriate in that sense? Unless you're Superman, that is.
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand the struggle a writer feels to convey urgency in a scene. Sometimes simply running won't cut it. I think it's the sheer number of times I've seen this done that troubles me so. It has become a stand-by a writer uses to push through a scene, and I'm beginning to think it's just laziness.
It's more appropriate to use the word 'flew' in this sense: "If I read a body part flying across something one more time, my eyeballs will fly out of their sockets out of sheer frustration."
C'mon people. Get a thesaurus.
