The other day, my very puzzled beta reader asked me, “What’s a meep?”
I laughed, and then had to apologize: my poor beta reader had scoured the internet for a “meep” before coming to me to express his confusion. The truth is, “meep” is my stop word. I put it inside my drafts to quickly access different things using the Ctrl-F function. I don’t know where it came from, but if I had to, I’d point toward the Roadrunner and his ACME-loving nemesis, Wile E. Coyote.
But aside from the potential humor of mishaps like this, stop words can be extremely useful.
What is a Stop Word?
A stop word is a nonsense word that will show up when you hit Ctrl-F. The “nonsense” part is actually required, since otherwise, you could get stuck Ctrl-F-ing for a word that’s in your document a hundred other times, or even stuck in the middle of another word (ie, the word “heet” might show up inside “sheet” or “cheetah”). I use “meep” since it avoids all these issues, but you could do anything you wanted – “blurp” or “crak” or “yij.” Try going for one of your toddler’s favorite words for an extra dose of nostalgia!
Finding Your Place
When you’re writing something, it’s not hard to figure out where you stopped; all you have to do is scroll to the end. But when you’re editing, you could end up stopping in the middle of a chapter on page 132. How the heck are you supposed to find that again when your word processor closes, or when you’ve got to scroll up and fix something a few pages back? Easy: just pop in your stop word wherever you stop. A simple Ctrl-F will get you back there, stat.
Marking an Issue
Occasionally when we’re writing, we’re surging so fast through a draft that we don’t have time to look stuff up or iron out details. When this happens, you can just pop in a stop word and plow on. In the case of my beta reader, I had placed the word “meep” where I wanted something to be (specifically, the item a transgender woman might use to hide certain parts of her anatomy, which in this case ended up simply being “tape”). An easy fix with a Google search, but at the time, I didn’t want to break my own concentration.
Fixing Plot Holes
When you’re going back through a draft and making major plot changes, sometimes there are unexpected casualties. For example, you might reference scenes or characters that you’ve already cut, or say something that you’re not sure is accurate anymore. Depending on what you’re focusing on the time, taking care of all of these little boogers could be too distracting – or they might be things you can’t fully make decisions on until your current round of edits is done. So just pop in your stop word, and once you’re done with those edits, do a Ctrl-F and clean out your draft!