Author Confessions: Too Much Heart

I’ve been talking about a lot of words but the past few posts were about verbs. Let me spend some time talking about the most overused word I’ve found (and have used in my own writing) in romantic fiction.

Heart.

Her heart raced.

She treasured it in her heart.

Her heart sped up.

Her heart ached.

Because emotion is often centered in our heart, authors tend to focus on that alone when they describe scenes. However, there is an entire body that can react to emotion and the book The Emotion Thesaurus can be helpful regardless of whether the emotion is love, jealousy, anger, loneliness… I highly recommend any author purchase that book and the companion pieces on positive and negative traits.   They are valuable resources. Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have some more in the series that I just ordered and look forward to having on my bookshelf as resources.

Let’s try some different ways to say the examples above:

“Her heart raced.” Let’s try this instead: She couldn’t catch her breath.

“She treasured it in her heart.” How about: She closed her eyes to capture the moment.

“Her heart sped up.” Maybe instead: She placed a hand on her chest in a futile attempt to calm herself.

“Her heart ached.” Perhaps this: Tears welled in her eyes and she blinked back the tears.

Caveat:

You don’t have to eliminate every instance of the word heart in your prose. Especially when a character is speaking or perhaps texting or writing something. We often tend to use the word heart, but there is an entire physical and emotional body of description to draw on to add depth and color to your story and keep the reader engaged. Avoid writing with too much heart, at least in terms of words. I hope your efforts to put words on the page are filled with an overflowing passion for your work-in-progress.