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Wait For a Buyer. The downside to working through Constant-Content, however, is that there is no guarantee your work will sell. Ever.

It’s not as violent as it sounds, but this process can prove painful for many writers; it’s all about getting rid of self-indulgent, flowery writing

don’t go off the deep end with the thesaurus. Don’t choose every synonym Word suggests for your replacements, as some lead to awkward phrasing and don’t fit within the context. Your words should fit naturally in the sentence while also decreasing redundancy.

Look for words and phrases like “a number of,” “in order to,” and especially “that.” All can be replaced with shorter and more powerful words or can be completely cut out.

Take that advice beyond the beginning stages, though, and what you get are stories that really should move the reader but don’t, either because the emotions are all related from the outside or because the narrative doesn’t provide the sort of dense, information-rich substrata upon which complex characters are built.

Some speakers have trouble with nouns that end in -ful, puzzling, for example, between cupfuls and cupsful. This is a case in which common sense should probably advise against consulting M-W. Although the M-W entries for cupful, handful, and armful list the plurals cupfuls, handfuls, and armfuls first, they give cupsful, handsful, and armsful as alternative spellings. In addition, the spelling handfull is in there as an “also.” My American spellchecker does not countenance any of these alternatives. Cupsful doesn’t cut it because compound nouns are made up of two or more words that can be used on their own. For example, the words in the compound policeman can be used separately: “The man called for the police.” The element ful in cupful is not a word; it’s a suffix. Common sense tells me that cupsful is incorrect.