I hate guides for writers that issue commandments, like Stephen King’s famous “thou shalt not adverb” (not a direct quote), or “take out any use of ‘that’ that you can find,” or “passive voice should never be used.” Language is flexible, durable, and infinitely variable. Use it as you will. This post is all about using your favorite techniques in moderation, and being aware of the possible mistakes they might cause.

Many new (as well as some more experienced) authors have a comfort zone when it comes to writing. Certain metaphors, adjectives, names, phrases or even patterns of sentence construction become their default choice. Often, they’re not even aware that they’re doing it. But readers certainly are, and they can get very annoyed by them. We call these habits “tics.” Knowing what yours are, and how to deal with them, can help you to push your writing to the next level.

Now, these tics are all perfectly fine to use. And since these patterns are not incorrect, they are impossible for spell-checking software to spot. Although they jump out immediately to readers, recognizing your own tics can be quite difficult. In this blog post, I’m going to name and shame some of the most common tics I’ve seen in books I’ve read and edited. I’ll even confess my own! This is advice I find myself giving again and again to authors who have hired me for developmental editing, and lucky you — you get it for free.

Listy lists

You can do a lot with lists. You can highlight contradictions, contrast emotions, build a bouquet of images that form a scene, and speed up or slow the rhythm and pace down so that your next sentence — a punchy and short one — makes your reader catch their breath. Lists are great. Some of the best writers in the world use lists to build the tension, mood or setting. And any editor worth her salt can help you with those pesky commas.

The cat pounced on the mouse, tackled it to the ground, grabbed it with its teeth and, with a satisfied flick of its tail, deposited it in my shoe.

The problem comes when you ruin the impact of a solid, effective list by having too many of them. Lists can also leave you at risk of run-on sentences:

I picked up the mouse, retched, threw it out the window, saw my neighbor at the last minute, ducked, I hoped he didn’t know where the flying dead mouse had come from.

Did you spot the comma that should have been a period, or even a semicolon? If not, you might need an editor to help you.

How much is too much? I’d say stick to one or two dazzling lists in a scene. And don’t follow a list with a list.

Participial phrases

Chuckling, I was distracted by the silly example about the mouse. Furrowing my brow, I wondered if listy lists were one of my tics. Walking over to the kitchen, I boiled the kettle. This problem required more tea.

Can you spot the participial phrases I used there? I won’t tangle you up with the technical grammar terms. Grammarians can read more about it on the helpful Purdue OWL website.  Put simply, in terms of writing a story, it’s when you describe what your character is doing, where they are, their previous action, and so on, then stick a comma after it and then say what they do next. They tend to come at the beginning of paragraphs.

Hidden from my neighbor, I heard him shout, “Blimey! Where the hell did this mouse come from?” Looking around, down, and up at the sky, he shook his fist at the heavens. Smugly purring, my cat looked on, satisfied with the chaos she had wrought.

This tic puts you at risk of misplaced or dangling modifiers:

Shouting at the sky, passersby stared. Rain began to fall in big fat droplets. Landing on his head, they thought he might have finally lost his mind.

Who’s shouting? Is the rain passing judgment on his sanity? Did they jump on his head?

You can fix misplaced modifiers by changing the order of the words in the sentence and being clearer about who the subject of the verb is. For example, improving on the last one:

People stared as he shouted at the sky. Rain began to fall in big fat droplets. As the rain splashed onto his head, the passersby thought Old Man Wookfire might have finally lost his mind.

This one time, in a participial phrase

Directly related to the participial phrase, or perhaps a participial phrase in another form, this tic also puts you at risk of being overly specific about the context or when something is happening. This can be used to build anticipation, but it can also verge on the ridiculous and can even obscure the action in the scene:

As I slowly emerged from my hiding place, that rainy Monday afternoon, while Old Man Wookfire was yelling at the heavens, back in the summer of ’98, after my doomed trip to Thailand, when I was a young child, and as my tea was cooling on the counter, he looked right at me, while the rain fell.

Of course, my examples are exaggerated to prove my point, but I have seen authors stating both the time and the duration of an action within the participial phrase, and doing it a lot. If you’re telling the reader when or where something happened, try to just tell them once. If you have started a paragraph one way, try starting the next one a different way. If you use participial phrases a lot, try playing with the sentence structure to see if there’s a better way to do it.

Reflections

Stepping out of the sentence-level stuff and into the bigger story-telling aspects, one tic many authors have is overusing mirrors, photographs, or reflections to describe the physical appearance of the characters.

Luckily, the sun came out, so he saw his face in the window. A wrinkled, wet, and reddened old man stared back at him. His hair stuck out in every direction. He frowned.

Again, this is not inherently wrong, but you should only do it once per book.

Ho hum dialogue

Many authors, in an effort to synthesize natural and realistic speech, put the pauses, hesitations, and misspeaks into their dialogue. This is unnecessary; you can show uncertainty in more vivid and readable ways. And if it’s overused, it can get quite annoying for the reader.

“Oh well,” he muttered, “I never was much of a looker anyway.”

“Hmm,” I said quietly to myself, wondering what he had looked like when he was younger.

“Hmm,” he said, wondering where that damn mouse had come from in the first place.

By now my tea had gone completely cold. “Oh well,” I said.

Now, you might have a character who has a certain verbal tic, and that’s great for establishing their unique voice. But watch out for when your characters all seem to have the same pattern of speech. Do they all start every utterance with “So”?

The marionettes

As you write your novel, you may feel like the great Puppet Master, manipulating your poor main character from conflict to conflict, and completely ruining their lives (so that they can overcome that conflict in a wonderful redemption arc). However, watch out for controlling their movements too specifically. It can be assumed that if a character is talking to someone, they are facing them, and if they are walking in a certain direction, that they turned to do that.

Redundant phrases are to be avoided because they’re redundant.

On top of that, being overly specific about movements can slow the pace of a good story to an absolute crawl, and lead readers to throw the book (like a dead mouse) out of the window.

I turned and walked to the kitchen. I reached for my teacup. Then I raised it to my lips, opened my mouth, and slowly took a sip. Yep, it was very cold. Outside, my soggy neighbor turned to the passersby who were still muttering among themselves.

“What are you staring at?” he yelled loudly. He raised his hand, palm facing himself, and lowered his index finger, ring finger and pinky, leaving the middle finger standing straight up. “Sod off!” he shouted, and angrily marched inside.

How to spot your own tics

You may be a particularly accomplished writer, but everyone has their own patterns of comfort, and it can be incredibly hard to recognize your own tics. One technique many authors use is to read their work out loud to themselves.

The easiest remedy, however, is to hire a fresh pair of eyes to go over your work and help you spot them. Editors act as your first reader, and a well-trained editor will pick up on these not-wrong-but-uncomfortable-or-annoying patterns in your writing. Then they’ll give you options for remedying them without losing your unique voice.

If you’d like some help recognizing the tics in your writing that might bug your readers, send me an email!

Hey, you said you were going to own up to your own tic! I feel cheated.

All right, all right. As I’ve said, it’s hard to spot your own tics, but I do know that I have a habit of writing incredibly long sentences with complex, nested clauses, lengthy lists, surprise tangents halfway through — bet you didn’t see this one coming! — and maybe one of each type of punctuation; only if it’s correct, of course. I have to remind myself to write sentences that are straightforward. Even then, I forget. But (and it is perfectly fine to start sentences with conjunctions, by the way) I always have a smart editor friend read my articles before I publish them. Nothing beats a fresh pair of eyes!

My editor friend told me I also use parentheses too much (and she may be right!)