Just…

In the final stages of editing and tidying up my next novel to be published, and I’m trying to weed out the repetitions; i seem to get a word in my mind and it pops up all over the place, once it was ‘utterly’, once it was ‘absolutely’, this time it has been ‘actually’ and ‘just’.

The great thing about word processors is the ‘find’ facility – in the olden days when I wrote stories by hand, and then with a type-writer, I would have to go through myself, finding all these repeats, correct or change them or take them out altogether, and then rewrite or retype the whole thing…  These days, I search and find and change or alter or omit or leave where they are.

With the story I’m working on, it is written in a first person narrative, and the character of the ‘writer’ comes across very strongly in the narrative; so there are idiosyncrasies, repeats, colloquialisms, a style which I hope conveys something about my character. However, this is a novel to be read by others, so it has to make sense,  and the funny little ways of the supposed writer, can’t become boring or annoying or distracting or come between the reader and the narrative. So he might say ‘jolly’ whereas a third person narrator would use ‘very’, he might interject things like ‘and I can tell you!’, and have little deviations and mental wanderings off to add to the reader’s sense of who he is. However, it is a fiction, so it has to observe some of the conventions of an ordinary novel – I’m just a story-teller, I’m not an experimental writer, I’m not trying to do anything new, just telling a tale.

So… in my effort to tighten up my story I have cut out rather a lot of ‘justs’… in fact more than two hundred,and there are still plenty left! ‘just’ can be an adverb or an adjective, and there are plenty of idioms and phrases which use it…

• a little while earlier ‘it had just began to rain’
• or at that moment ‘I’m just on the phone’
• exactly ‘just  what he meant’
• nearly, or by a small amount ‘i just missed the bus’
• only or a little ‘he was just an amateur’
• really, very, absolutely ‘she is just gorgeous!’
• only one of something ‘just one’
• to make underline a statement ‘he just won’t listen’
• or to lessen a statement ‘just for a little while’

…but there are loads of idioms: