A long time ago, I read a book* in which a famous author had gotten a raging case of writer's block because a graduate student had run his writing through a computer program and discovered that the word he used most often was "greasy." Suddenly, the author couldn't write anymore. Every time he tried to put something down, he kept thinking about "greasy, greasy, greasy." That just happened to me. Not the computer part, or the famous part, or even actually the writer's block part, but in the course of my latest revision of The Book, I discovered (with the help of the excellent Agent Ted), that my characters are sighing all over the place. Sigh, sigh, sigh. He sighed, she sighed, the dog sighed. (I wish I were making that up. The dog sighed. Sigh.) It turns out that, whenever I need a character to pause before he or she says something, I put in a sigh. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it was happening way too often. If you started looking
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