Confession: I was pretty pleased with myself.
Back at the beginning of my writing career, I used exclamation points like they were going out of style. This slowly evolved over time until I not only abhorred them in books (except for when someone is yelling or cheering or such), but I rarely even use them on Noveltea. Now, I must admit they sometimes sneak into my emails and texts like a prison-wide jail break, but that’s normally when I’m being frivolous with my writing style anyway.
So, I decided to search When Life Hands You Lymes and see how many exclamation points I had. I figured there would probably be a dozen or so, cause there’s some yelling that goes on, plus a surprise party.
Y’all. I had EIGHTY-SIX exclamation points. No, really. Eighty-six. How in the world? And right there, the pleased-ness (yes, I just coined that word), I felt at my morphing into a non-exclamation-point-using author vanished. So, of course I had to look at each and every one of those exclamation points and see why in the world they were cluttering up my book.
Thankfully in the space of two sittings I was able to significantly cut down on that scarily excessive amount of exclamation points and return my book to a much more respectful standing in the library of my brain.
Here are some examples of exclamation points I change to periods or question marks:
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Yet, despite my best efforts there were times when an exclamation point was really needed to convey the way the words was spoken. Take for instance, “Merry Christmas!” is the normal way to greet someone (on Christmas day at least), and if I had just written “Merry Christmas.” then the readers would get the impression that Madalyn wasn’t actually excited about Christmas. And yeah, we couldn’t have that. So, here are some examples of the exclamation points I kept:
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Same thing with birthday greetings. No one texts “Happy Birthday, Best friend.” when they’re wanting to spread cheer and happiness, right? An exclamation point is practically required with that type of text:
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And then there’s the case when someone was surprised and screeched a word in excited happiness:
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And that, folks, is the saga of my vicious fight with the semi-dreaded exclamation points and how I cut their number from eighty-six down to thirty-seven. I’m still slightly shocked that so many of them worked their way into WLHYL, and that no one pointed them out to me, but I guess maybe they were hidden pretty well…
What about y’all? Do you have a hard time with those sneaky little bits of punctuation?
Noveltea 
I certainly do!!!!!!!
;D
Oops. Anyway, thanks for sharing this peek into your writing. 😉
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Haha, I do in emails and texting, hence the disclaimer I put in. 😉
I'm glad I could share a peek into my writing and I'm glad you stopped by! I'm very much looking forward to seeing some of your sister-in-laws soon! 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Not to be the disagreeable lump in the gravy… I actually would have kept three of the four you deleted, removing only the one from when Katie growled. Also, I'd have moved the first one to the second sentence: “I knew it. I knew it!” And while 86 exclamation points may seem like a lot when you live to avoid them, consider the fact that it's only about one per thousand words. 🙂
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Humm… That is interesting, because someone else I was talking to mentioned that they liked exclamation points, too. Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way? When I see too many exclamation points in a book, the word “novice” starts screaming in my brain like an alarm bell. I guess not all brains sound like mine though. I'll just have to see what the beta readers say in this next round. =)
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I agree with you that too many exclamation points sometimes indicate low-quality writing, but I think maybe you're going a bit too far in the other direction. I just checked, and there are 122 exclamation points in “The Sparrow Found a House,” which is roughly half the current length of WLHYL. Should I be worried? 😉
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Me going too far in the other direction? HUMM… That could very possibly be true. And should you be worried? The book is already published, so worrying is futile, right? 🙂 (Okay, really, I don't remember noticing them when I read the book, so that's a good sign considering how I feel about them.)
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