One of the banes of writing fiction is trying to find interesting ways to say ordinary things. And smiling is one of those. Everyone smiles. It’s built into our DNA to smile. We smile to show happiness, friendliness, or even to cover up how insecure we feel. And our characters smile, too, a lot.

So how do you avoid sounding hyper-repetitive when you describe how happy, friendly, and insecure your characters are? Here are 11+ suggestions. (The ‘+’ is because some of the following items produce multiple possibilities. You’ll see what I mean.)

A fundamental rule of style is that you should avoid the verb “to be,” preferring instead strong, descriptive verbs that show, rather than tell.

As an example, instead of writing, “The light was bright,” you should prefer, “The light blinded her as a hot-white flame,” or some such. So every time you use am, is, are, was, were, be, been, or being, that’s a signal that you need to rephrase…

EXCEPT...

As it turns out, this common rule of thumb oversimplifies the issue, sometimes to the point that confusion can result.

No less a writer than Holly Lisle gives a misleading example, on her web page about one-pass manuscript revision:

Is your scene full of weak words? How many times have you used is, was, or were?… Eliminate forms of the verb “to be” wherever you find them, rewriting the sentence with a stronger verb. “It was raining,” becomes “The rain slashed down, tearing up the gardens and ripping leaves from the trees.”

But the verb in that sentence is not the verb “to be”!

Because I’m a writer, when one of my friends can’t think of the right word for what they’re trying to say, they turn to me. “You’re a writer. What’s the word I’m looking for?”

Hell if I know. What do I look like? A dictionary?

God’s honest truth: as a writer, I can never find the right word. This may surprise you. I know it surprises many of my friends. Well, you’d think I would know the right word for each job, judging from my writing skill. But in reality, my vocabulary sucks. I usually know the right word exists. I know I’ve heard it before, or read it before. It’s on the tip of my tongue. But I simply can’t think of what it is.

This is as true of English as it is of other languages that I (almost) know. I usually have little trouble with grammar, even in foreign languages, because grammar is based on a relatively small number of general rules that apply to most words and phrases and sentences, with only a few exceptions. But vocabulary, that’s 228,132 exceptions (and no real rules at all).

No wonder I never write unless I have a thesaurus on hand.