All of us develop bad writing habits. My usual is to repeat a word, a different one with each book, and later discover that it appears three-five times on a given page. Into Germanic grammar also accidentally slipping. Or doing the German/older English trick of having at least five clauses in one sentence, even if the verb is not at the end.
If any of these fit the character’s dialect, or the time period, then they are not so bad. Like, the Valley Girl character, like, will totally abuse certain words, like, way too often. [sound of gum popping] However, your readers will quickly tire of it, so be careful. Writing entire books in dialect seems to have gone out of fashion.
However, I managed to develop a new bad habit – dropping who is saying what in dialogue. Not losing dialogue tags entirely, because I’m me and tag dialogue the way vandals tag urban walls, but not being as clear as I should.
I caught this as I started going back through two manuscripts, and discovered I had trouble telling who was speaking. Oops. Not good, because if I’m confused, readers will be lost. I suspect the habit developed because I was writing at speed, and also focusing more on looking up technical details and geography references, rather than on clarity of prose. In my mind, as I wrote, I knew exactly who was saying or doing what. When I returned to the work several weeks later? Your guess probably would have been better than mine.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “New Bad Habits: Writer Edition”
Definitely a bad habit. As a reader I hate having to count back to find out who is saying what; it’s a really good way to throw one out of the story – especially in those cases where I never managed to solve the problem. I always assumed that this was the result of bad advice to writers that discouraged dialogue tags. Better a boring repetition of “he said”, “she said” than reader confusion.
Mike (who has no other idea how to show who is writing the comment – do I need to be logged into WordPress?)
I try to use action beats to convey emotion and situational awareness as people move physically through the scenes…
…but sometimes, “He said” is short, to the point, and exactly what the reader needs.
The characters may be confused, but not the reader! Misled, perhaps, with a red herring, but not confused!
(And yes, you do have to be logged into WordPress for it to show who’s writing the comment.)
Long convoluted sentences are one of my besetting sins in first draft: I blame my studies in French and Latin, and my exposure to older British authors, with their fondness for semi-humorous double negatives and tendency to borrow circumlocutions from the Continental languages they or their friends spoke. I usually spot them as I type them and disentangle them, but it makes dictation complicated sometimes.
Ah, the “what on earth did I mean there” moments in revision.
I’ve been going through a Work-Not-In-Progress, trying to revise myself in, only to realize I left out chunk of scenes, and even an entire chapter. They’re brief notes of what needs to happen in the notebook, and I was clearly doing the high-stress “I got that down, moving on to the next thing” without unpacking it into the actual draft.
It’s a typo, not a tagging error – but I’ve noticed several books recently where line breaks are missing in the text. One can usually unravel it in a two person dialogue, but it gets very difficult when there are more speakers.
Depending on how screwed up WordPress (Delenda Est) is running, I’ve been able to click the envelope, where it gives me a dialog box requesting
a) email address
b) Nom-de-comment
c) website, if any
and some switches for emails, and lastly a “save my name”
Not a login, but it works. I don’t have a login and it doesn’t stop me. [insert evil chuckle] 🙂
My biggest issue is writing how I talk/think. So, really long run-on sentences with lots of parts, that all go well together and do pack a lot of information into the sentence, as well as going back to explain something that I feel might not have been explained thoroughly the first time I said it, like it being both a run-on sentence, but also being correct for what I’m trying to explain.
Yeah, like that.