Writers’ Tics

My posts over the summer are going to be on the shorter side, as I spend the bulk of my writing time on a special project that has more to do with my role as a church pastor than as a fantasy writer.

One of the annoying things about being a novelist is that I have trouble reading other people’s books because I tend to edit them unconsciously as I’m reading. I’ll notice things like unintentionally repeated verbs in the same paragraph or sentences that rhyme by accident. Of course, there’s nothing I can do about this stuff because the books are already published…and I’m just a guy who got a singular copy out of the library. But there we are.

One of the most common things I notice reading other’s books is writers’ tics. A writer’s tic is a particular word or phrase that they use a little bit too often – often enough that the reader will notice it. Usually, it’s a line of description or a uncommon verb that jumps out the more often it appears in the text.

I read a book last summer in which the author described characters “sucking their teeth” about nine times. The book I’m currently reading has smiles “tugging at the corners of people’s mouths” a bit too often. One of my favorite authors uses the word “pent” a lot and in a way I’ve never seen any other writer do so – a “pent silence” and so on.

I currently only have one traditionally published novel – 2013’s Letters from Ruby. When I was self-editing that book before sending it to my editors, I realized that the main character cried so often that it was totally distracting. I made it my mission to cut out about three quarters of the instances of Calvin Harper weeping, and it made the book better.

When you’re in editing mode, the best way to catch your own writer’s tic is to read your draft as fast as possible – all in one sitting if you can. That way, you will be more likely to notice jarringly repeated phrases. Then you can decide how frequently a bit of description can exist in your particular work before it becomes distracting to the reader. If a phrase shows up on page 62 and then not again until page 243, then you’re okay. But if it appears on page 103, page 132, page 189, and page 205 as well, the reader will probably notice.