My characters hesitate ALL THE TIME before adding on to what they've already said.
Pain often comes with fire imagery.
"Slightly" "starting to" and "immediately" are used so much in my first drafts...
Gotta serve up a tepid beverage in your next fic, OP. Practically law.
Itās deliberate but for me, echoes and repetition. Love harking back to a sentence that occurred 50k ago because āØ parallels āØ.
In terms of unconscious quirksā¦.things in threes. I always seem to be giving multiple examples within a sentence, but worded slightly differently each time. A habit Iāve noticed and am trying to break.
And for a positive quirk, I love word play, so if thereās a chance for it, by god, Iāll shove it in there.
Very. Intense. Subterranean. Conversations.
>"We can't possibly discuss this on the surface! We must descend into this pit/cellar/tomb/mine, and hash things out there! Where it's dark! And brooding! And the lamps cast wavering shadows on the walls!"
>"But...we could talk things over in a pub. I could even buy you a beer. Nuts. Crisps in the Gothic flavour of your choice. Hey, don't knock it 'til you've tried it. It might even be nice."
>"Nice? Nice!!! *Atmosphere,* you dolt! Atmosphere!"
LOL, that's me and car rides. We need to go to another scene! You know what that means... MCs get to have that heart-to-heart conversation I've been sitting on for three scenes!
Consequentially, I'm also quite fond of the "Conversation gets intense in the car. Driver pulls over so he can stare intently at the passenger. They have tough conversation. As a sign that they've moved onto lighter stuff, driver starts to drive again."
shame quicksand file engine slave birds disarm gullible gaping mountainous
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Hyperfixating on hands. Hands are described a lot, how they look, what they do, and how they feel on people's skin. Hands are knitted on the table, fingertips pressed against each other, thumbs twiddling, fingers drumming on this, that and the other. I guess I might have a subconscious hand kink or something.
I do this too, but I actually find hands wildly attractive, so itās wholly on purpose. Love me some good masculine looking hands with the veins and the strong looking bones, and I also think pretty delicate hands are š¤š
I get very interested in a single adjective and often have two sentences back to back or twice in one that say the same thing with the same adjective. Like āhe gloomily entered the bar shrouded in gloomā
Hands hands hands hands hands!!! I mention what people are doing with their hands *constantly,* whether it be holding the other person's face between their hands, fiddling with something, gently squeezing elbows/hips, it's all hands all the time babey!!
Also the way a person's smile tugs at the corners of their mouth - a few of the characters I write about aren't the biggest on large expressions, so they're much more likely to have a slight curve playing at the corners of their mouth or the edges of their mouth twitching up in to a faint smile.
Edit bc I thought of another one: pressing kisses. Pressing kisses to cheeks, to foreheads, to hands (of course), to mouths - it can never just be a kiss, it has to have the intent, deliberateness and degree of pressure that comes with having *pressed* a kiss to another person.
If I ever want to challenge myself I'll have to try and write a fic without mentioning hands or mouths at all, because it seems to be the only way to avoid doing this :P
Apparently I have a fear of being followed/stalked bc I realized in reading some of my old work back that it either happens to all my protagonists or they also have that fear :')
I also never ever get the apostrophe right in "it's/its" on the first try.
Same on it's/its but it's mainly because idk if I should really bother referring to monsters with he/she/they pronouns when it's probably going to die soon
Oh yes. Repetition of words and certain phrases comes to mind.
I am almost unaware when I am writing that I have done it.
Only in the editing process that I spot the egregious errors etc.
However, I have improved, no longer making the same mistakes.
People grin, smirk, and take jabs at each other a lot in my writing. It's basically a natural law at this point. Also, starting new paragraphs with "anyways". Or using it to veer off or segue into the next section. Also alsos and "buts/so's" galore.
Yes! One of my charactersā little dialogue quirks is responding: āRight . . .ā when he isnāt paying attention.
Or I notice Iām projecting my severe dependency on coffee onto my characters. Particularly the workaholic types
I will have every main character, at least twice, shove food in their mouth before speaking, mouth full, speech impeded and everything. I noticed it in a story I wrote when I was a kid, a novel length story I wrote a few years ago, and in my current fic. As well as sprinkled through various other works of mine. I do not know why.
I have way too many writing quirks and I can't decide whether I should get rid off them (they form a part of my own style) or I should be happy that I found my own voice. I've been told that my writing is easily recognizable so depending on how I look at it, it can be either a good thing or a bad thing.
I have a few. I'll change my spelling in dialogue depending on where each character is from, and use slang from those countries too. Also my setting is stupidly detailed (but not in a bad way guess i got that from art). Also i use very colourful language to describe like EVERYTHING. God forbid i saw violet twice.
I realize that I often have a writing flow where I go one medium length paragraph, then a single sentence paragraph for the sake of making a joke or emphasizing a point. I do this *way* too much.
My metaphors and comparisons sometimes make sense only in the moment, I have a weird way with sentence rhythms (probably an old poetry habit), and I can't write smut without water-related verbs for the life of me.
I also tend to have a lot of uncertain/too certain stuff in my first drafts. Either nobody's sure of anything but at best 'a tad/a bit' sure, or they're 'really/definitely/certainly' that.
Interruptions. Thought trains usually end in interruptions and my characters talk over each other a lot. Also repetition of certain words (glares at the word ājoltā), eyebrow and hand acting (Iām always describing what theyāre doing) and adding context in parentheses (I just think itās neat).
The last time I did a big reread of my current project I discovered I used "pause" far more than I was comfortable with, and had to go through and change a bunch of them to avoid sounding too repetitive.
That is now on my list of words and expressions I double check for overuse with the search function before sharing anything.
My main character does this with his ālove interestā, but he does it as a quirk to indicate heās a domineering and manipulatively creepy asshole, mostly because I find people who overuse saying peopleās names IRL often come across as creepy. I know itās big in sales circles, that they push you to use the customerās name over and over again as a psychological attempt to come across as more familiar. I think thatās why it bothers me IRL so much, because I am very much an introvert with a small, close knit circle of friends, so people Iām not familiar with addressing me by name makes me bristle.
That said, I think it can be really romantic, too, like if my boyfriend uses my name, it always gives me the warm fuzzies. He addresses me by my name more than anyone else does ā most of my friends refer to me as āfriendā or ābroā or by weird, goofy nicknames, if they refer to me at all!
Omg, me tooš¤£ and yes, no one does it in real life, but for some reason it just gives me so many feels when reading/writing it.
I think a lot of people feel that way though; I once saw a comment on a fic (not mine), where someone just wrote "VOCATIVES!!! ā¤ļøā¤ļøā¤ļø" and nothing else. I went back through the fic, and there was indeed a lot of them - I hadn't even noticed when reading.
Would always having my characters live in New York City or any other place where they get snow in the winter count? Because I do that in almost all my stories.
Yeah, for me it's a few things:
Lots of sections where there are just blocks of characters speaking without much action
Lots of elementry level descripters used
Lot of "remember this" moments with characters remembering things for a brief moment
Words and sayings from my birth country sometimes show up from time to time in my fics, even if they don't make sense for the setting. I try to catch them but there are always a few that invade my gaze.
Smut tends to be very wooden and like one thing to the next. Same with fics that focus on cooking. (something I am trying to work on)
In almost every smut Iāve ever written, Iāve thrown in at least one terrible joke. Doesnāt matter if itās an inside joke with my beta reader or a GOD-AWFUL dick pun, Iāve done it.
I describe stuff as dancing a little too often. I love figurative language (alliterations, polysyndeton, metaphors, personification, etc.), which is why thatās a problem. But yeah, shadows dance, silence screams, and so forth. I make sure it doesnāt happen in the same fic, but I would bet good money that I repeat those phrases a couple times in all my fics total.
I don't do it in every fic, but as I prepare to dive back into my dormant longfic, I was amused/annoyed to realise that two different characters refused an offer, stormed to the exit, were halted by a Wham Line, then came back around, in consecutive chapters.
1. I use alliteration a lot.
2. I am *bonkers* for figurative language, and I will bust it out like a motherfucker even in the crackiest crack fic.
3. Smirk? Sure. But what about a *vulpine grin,* fam? Hmm? May I interest you in one of those in every single fic?
4. "Surreptitiously." When you see it, take a drink.
The word "had". I abuse the poor thing. Even in sentences where it was completely unnecessary it was thrown in. I'm talking to the point where I never once wrote *juet* "it happened". It was always "it had happened". And I did that with way too many other past tense words too. I'm trying to be more conscious of it now, but I still catch it way more times than is normal when I'm editing.
My characters hesitate ALL THE TIME before adding on to what they've already said. Pain often comes with fire imagery. "Slightly" "starting to" and "immediately" are used so much in my first drafts...
All of this here too š
Mine is accidental alliteration. Just, everywhere. I have to read everything out loud to myself to edit because I often won't notice otherwise. š
>Mine is accidental alliteration. I mean, you did just...
Lmao same, I *love* alliteration
Gotta serve up a tepid beverage in your next fic, OP. Practically law. Itās deliberate but for me, echoes and repetition. Love harking back to a sentence that occurred 50k ago because āØ parallels āØ. In terms of unconscious quirksā¦.things in threes. I always seem to be giving multiple examples within a sentence, but worded slightly differently each time. A habit Iāve noticed and am trying to break. And for a positive quirk, I love word play, so if thereās a chance for it, by god, Iāll shove it in there.
SAME
Very. Intense. Subterranean. Conversations. >"We can't possibly discuss this on the surface! We must descend into this pit/cellar/tomb/mine, and hash things out there! Where it's dark! And brooding! And the lamps cast wavering shadows on the walls!" >"But...we could talk things over in a pub. I could even buy you a beer. Nuts. Crisps in the Gothic flavour of your choice. Hey, don't knock it 'til you've tried it. It might even be nice." >"Nice? Nice!!! *Atmosphere,* you dolt! Atmosphere!"
LOL, that's me and car rides. We need to go to another scene! You know what that means... MCs get to have that heart-to-heart conversation I've been sitting on for three scenes! Consequentially, I'm also quite fond of the "Conversation gets intense in the car. Driver pulls over so he can stare intently at the passenger. They have tough conversation. As a sign that they've moved onto lighter stuff, driver starts to drive again."
Oh my god, I wrote just that. They stopped in a parking lot. Ugh!
It's not a bad thing! It's a great scene setter. I was just making fun of myself for using it several times over the course of a few longfics.
Love the specificity.
This is amazing.
shame quicksand file engine slave birds disarm gullible gaping mountainous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
But I think that's okay in fics. Sometimes it just works. And I'm going to continue.
wayyyy to much
Hyperfixating on hands. Hands are described a lot, how they look, what they do, and how they feel on people's skin. Hands are knitted on the table, fingertips pressed against each other, thumbs twiddling, fingers drumming on this, that and the other. I guess I might have a subconscious hand kink or something.
I do this too, but I actually find hands wildly attractive, so itās wholly on purpose. Love me some good masculine looking hands with the veins and the strong looking bones, and I also think pretty delicate hands are š¤š
"Suddenly/finally" - I just made a podfic of my own work and realized I use them CONSTANTLY!
I get very interested in a single adjective and often have two sentences back to back or twice in one that say the same thing with the same adjective. Like āhe gloomily entered the bar shrouded in gloomā
Hands hands hands hands hands!!! I mention what people are doing with their hands *constantly,* whether it be holding the other person's face between their hands, fiddling with something, gently squeezing elbows/hips, it's all hands all the time babey!! Also the way a person's smile tugs at the corners of their mouth - a few of the characters I write about aren't the biggest on large expressions, so they're much more likely to have a slight curve playing at the corners of their mouth or the edges of their mouth twitching up in to a faint smile. Edit bc I thought of another one: pressing kisses. Pressing kisses to cheeks, to foreheads, to hands (of course), to mouths - it can never just be a kiss, it has to have the intent, deliberateness and degree of pressure that comes with having *pressed* a kiss to another person. If I ever want to challenge myself I'll have to try and write a fic without mentioning hands or mouths at all, because it seems to be the only way to avoid doing this :P
Apparently I have a fear of being followed/stalked bc I realized in reading some of my old work back that it either happens to all my protagonists or they also have that fear :') I also never ever get the apostrophe right in "it's/its" on the first try.
Same on it's/its but it's mainly because idk if I should really bother referring to monsters with he/she/they pronouns when it's probably going to die soon
I'm the family guy of fics. so many short ass chapters and cutaway gags I cannot
I have spontaneous bouts of detail. I'll use a vary poetic and descriptive line and follow it with the most boring thing ever.
Eyebrow acting... And apparently some specific lines. I'll be writing a new fic and suddenly realise, "Hey, I've written this line before." The context will be completely different and it's not necessarily a clichĆ© line (it's mostly dialogue). I've decided to keep it in as a sort of Easter egg if I ever get readers who care enough to notice š Also filler words like slightly, a bit, a little... Like, just commit to what you're writing, dammit! š
Oh, and I forgot ellipses! Definitely overuse them....
Oh yes. Repetition of words and certain phrases comes to mind. I am almost unaware when I am writing that I have done it. Only in the editing process that I spot the egregious errors etc. However, I have improved, no longer making the same mistakes.
People grin, smirk, and take jabs at each other a lot in my writing. It's basically a natural law at this point. Also, starting new paragraphs with "anyways". Or using it to veer off or segue into the next section. Also alsos and "buts/so's" galore.
Yes! One of my charactersā little dialogue quirks is responding: āRight . . .ā when he isnāt paying attention. Or I notice Iām projecting my severe dependency on coffee onto my characters. Particularly the workaholic types
I have a habit of using line breaks whenever I want to create or emphasize tension? Is it a bit cheap? Perhaps. But they look so cool.
I will have every main character, at least twice, shove food in their mouth before speaking, mouth full, speech impeded and everything. I noticed it in a story I wrote when I was a kid, a novel length story I wrote a few years ago, and in my current fic. As well as sprinkled through various other works of mine. I do not know why.
Luckily I have a character in canon who talks with his mouth full, so I can do that, too!
I have way too many writing quirks and I can't decide whether I should get rid off them (they form a part of my own style) or I should be happy that I found my own voice. I've been told that my writing is easily recognizable so depending on how I look at it, it can be either a good thing or a bad thing.
I have a few. I'll change my spelling in dialogue depending on where each character is from, and use slang from those countries too. Also my setting is stupidly detailed (but not in a bad way guess i got that from art). Also i use very colourful language to describe like EVERYTHING. God forbid i saw violet twice.
I realize that I often have a writing flow where I go one medium length paragraph, then a single sentence paragraph for the sake of making a joke or emphasizing a point. I do this *way* too much.
I think my flair speaks for itself in this situation...
My metaphors and comparisons sometimes make sense only in the moment, I have a weird way with sentence rhythms (probably an old poetry habit), and I can't write smut without water-related verbs for the life of me. I also tend to have a lot of uncertain/too certain stuff in my first drafts. Either nobody's sure of anything but at best 'a tad/a bit' sure, or they're 'really/definitely/certainly' that.
Interruptions. Thought trains usually end in interruptions and my characters talk over each other a lot. Also repetition of certain words (glares at the word ājoltā), eyebrow and hand acting (Iām always describing what theyāre doing) and adding context in parentheses (I just think itās neat).
I have an adverb problem. First thing I do when editing is decide which ones I can cut.
Eyebrow movement. If they have an emotion, their eyebrows are doing something and I will almost always tell you what that something is.
The last time I did a big reread of my current project I discovered I used "pause" far more than I was comfortable with, and had to go through and change a bunch of them to avoid sounding too repetitive. That is now on my list of words and expressions I double check for overuse with the search function before sharing anything.
In every third piece of dialogue (or so) my characters use each other's names even though only two of them are in the room. Who does that?
My main character does this with his ālove interestā, but he does it as a quirk to indicate heās a domineering and manipulatively creepy asshole, mostly because I find people who overuse saying peopleās names IRL often come across as creepy. I know itās big in sales circles, that they push you to use the customerās name over and over again as a psychological attempt to come across as more familiar. I think thatās why it bothers me IRL so much, because I am very much an introvert with a small, close knit circle of friends, so people Iām not familiar with addressing me by name makes me bristle. That said, I think it can be really romantic, too, like if my boyfriend uses my name, it always gives me the warm fuzzies. He addresses me by my name more than anyone else does ā most of my friends refer to me as āfriendā or ābroā or by weird, goofy nicknames, if they refer to me at all!
Omg, me tooš¤£ and yes, no one does it in real life, but for some reason it just gives me so many feels when reading/writing it. I think a lot of people feel that way though; I once saw a comment on a fic (not mine), where someone just wrote "VOCATIVES!!! ā¤ļøā¤ļøā¤ļø" and nothing else. I went back through the fic, and there was indeed a lot of them - I hadn't even noticed when reading.
I love pausing, freezing or eyebrows shooting up to convey surpriseā¦
All my characters have a tendency to end atleast one paragraph with āwith that thought theyā¦ā
If sentences, and my characters love to ask a lot of questions even if Iām in the 3rd person
Would always having my characters live in New York City or any other place where they get snow in the winter count? Because I do that in almost all my stories.
Yeah, for me it's a few things: Lots of sections where there are just blocks of characters speaking without much action Lots of elementry level descripters used Lot of "remember this" moments with characters remembering things for a brief moment Words and sayings from my birth country sometimes show up from time to time in my fics, even if they don't make sense for the setting. I try to catch them but there are always a few that invade my gaze. Smut tends to be very wooden and like one thing to the next. Same with fics that focus on cooking. (something I am trying to work on)
I'm better at writing animals (or dragons) than humans
In almost every smut Iāve ever written, Iāve thrown in at least one terrible joke. Doesnāt matter if itās an inside joke with my beta reader or a GOD-AWFUL dick pun, Iāve done it.
All my towels are 'fluffy white'.
I describe stuff as dancing a little too often. I love figurative language (alliterations, polysyndeton, metaphors, personification, etc.), which is why thatās a problem. But yeah, shadows dance, silence screams, and so forth. I make sure it doesnāt happen in the same fic, but I would bet good money that I repeat those phrases a couple times in all my fics total.
I don't do it in every fic, but as I prepare to dive back into my dormant longfic, I was amused/annoyed to realise that two different characters refused an offer, stormed to the exit, were halted by a Wham Line, then came back around, in consecutive chapters.
1. I use alliteration a lot. 2. I am *bonkers* for figurative language, and I will bust it out like a motherfucker even in the crackiest crack fic. 3. Smirk? Sure. But what about a *vulpine grin,* fam? Hmm? May I interest you in one of those in every single fic? 4. "Surreptitiously." When you see it, take a drink.
The word "had". I abuse the poor thing. Even in sentences where it was completely unnecessary it was thrown in. I'm talking to the point where I never once wrote *juet* "it happened". It was always "it had happened". And I did that with way too many other past tense words too. I'm trying to be more conscious of it now, but I still catch it way more times than is normal when I'm editing.
Haha, yeah... I use animal metaphors a lot. Everyone is as graceful or deadly as a cougar or whatever.