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Introduction

Tyler Durden assures us that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes. And though I agree with St. Tyler the Perceptive on most of his canonical attitudes, and have in the past been accused of being someone’s Tyler Durden, I have to say -- beautiful and unique snowflakes, no, but unique snowflakes… sometimes.

Every writer -- whether you're just starting out or you've been writing for thirty years -- has a list of things that are often found in their writing. (Admit it. You'd be able to spot Terry Pratchett from a mile away, wouldn't you.) When these things work for the reader's experience, we call them "quirks", or, more broadly, "personal style". When they work against the reader's experience, we call them "flaws". Brief examples? Lewis Carroll has a quirk of writing paragraph-long sentences. Immanuel Kant has the flaw of tending towards unintelligibility.

An awareness of my particular habits, flaws, and quirks has, in my experience, brought me a long way along the path of writerly maturity, and I think that might be true of most people -- because that awareness will mean that you're writing things you find comfortable, playing to your strengths, and working around your weaknesses. It also means that you'll be much better at self-editing, and can turn something over to your beta reader (you do have on, yes? If not, get one soon) that's already had the major problems scrubbed out of it. Given time, you'll find that the awareness of the problems will change your first-draft writing habits, to the point where you'll have conquered those flaws -- and can start in on the next ones.



The finer points of dealing with quirks and flaws

There are several levels of flaws and quirks, from the big-picture to the small and subtle details of prose. For instance, when I first started out writing -- and yes, it was bad -- my flaws were major, big-picture flaws. My dialogue was clunky and stilted, I had entire chunks of show-don't-tell problems, and I had, uh, a small problem about "situationally-appropriate levels of melodrama". (I was a teenager.)

Thing is -- I didn't know about any of these problems. I was in creative-writing courses, but the teachers didn't generalize my problems. We would workshop individual pieces, but nobody ever connected the dots and said: hey, you know, your characters generally don't talk like real live humans, might want to work on that next time. Or: hey, you know, the melodrama is kind of thick enough to step in here; how about next time think about not having anyone commit suicide? (I was a deep and meaningful teenager.)

They say every writer has to write a million words of crap before they can get on to the good stuff; I probably hit closer to two. Somewhere upon the way of slogging through writing that really wasn’t very good, I hit on the idea that maybe I shouldn't be concentrating on making this particular story better (although I did continue to do that); maybe I should concentrate on making my writing ability better.

So how to identify flaws? (Ah ha, that’s the trick) To be honest: I've never met an active writer who was genuinely interested in improving, who didn't have some subtle sense of what their flaws are. We all have that vague nagging sense about what's slightly "off" about our writing, whether our readers would agree or not. So I came to this partially through my own observations, but mostly through listening -- and listening carefully, with my ego detached from the situation -- to what my beta readers and my feedback are telling me.

Now, what one reader might identify as a quirk, another reader might not notice, and a third will identify as a flaw. It's when you start getting into the things that drive a majority of your readers batshit, or actively work against your readers' understanding of what you're trying to communicate, that you should probably start working to eliminate those flaws from your writing. Take me, for instance: my plots tend to be linear, my characters are often stylized, and my prose can be occasionally clunky and drawn out.

The stylized-character thing is a quirk, because I can construct stories around it that don't detract from the reader experience (when writing short stories it actually comes in handy, and when writing novels it’s something that can be worked around if I’m careful with plot and theme). The linear-plot thing can be either a quirk or a flaw, because it depends on the type of story I'm trying to tell -- I can very easily, even for long stories, create a story where a complex plot isn't necessary. If I try to tell a story that requires or would benefit from a complex plot, and I fail, then it's a flaw; otherwise it's just a quirk. The clunky prose is something I have to be hyper-vigilant about, because clunky prose is nearly always entirely a flaw instead of a quirk; there is nothing that will throw your reader out of a story faster than getting lost halfway through a sentence.

More precisely what am I talking about? There's the simple things, like grammar and spelling, but I'm assuming if you’re reading this you’ve already grasped the finer points of grammar and spelling. (If not, again, a beta can help.) Other things, however, are far more subtle, and usually picked up by a good copyeditor. My beta used to yell at me constantly for overuse of the word "that". So one of the things I pay attention to, when self-editing, is hypersensitivity to every instance of "that" -- do I really need that one? My current beta keeps dinging me on misuse of "like" when I really mean "as though" (although we are engaged in a small debate as to whether it should be corrected to "as if" or "as though" wink -- "It's like he has fire spreading through his veins" will come back to me as "It's like [as if?] he has fire spreading through his veins", every single damn time.

Since I know that these are things I do commonly, I can look down my List Of Things Not To Do before I send a piece off to beta. This may seem obvious (if you know that these things are flaws in your writing, why not look for them and take them out?), but it's surprising how many people will readily admit that there is a certain thing they don't like about their writing, then not search for and eliminate that thing before sending a piece to a beta. If you know it's a flaw, go back and try to take it out! It doesn't always work, because you-the-writer will find that your eyes slide right over some of the mistakes, but it's an ongoing process. It's also, oddly enough, absolutely not something I keep in mind while I'm writing. While I'm getting the dump of words out of my head and onto the screen, I don't give a flying ******** what the quality of the prose is. Writing is for getting words out, revisions are for polishing.

You'll find, though -- at least I did -- that the more you fix these problems in the second draft, the more you stop making those errors in your first one. Barring the overloaded-sentence problem (which I'm well aware of but that's just how I think), I have certainly found that the more I work to eliminate a specific prose flaw, the less I make the flawed prose to begin with. Which means that eventually I can move those particular flaws off my list as crimes that I no longer serially commit… and move on to the new ones that I’ve discovered I do.

I completely agree about the good betas (once upon a time, I had a rant on here about the care and feeding of a beta, but I'm too lazy to find it). I wouldn't know what to do without mine, and they solve a lot of problems for you as a writer.

I think in a lot of ways it's harder to identify quirks than flaws, but I think it's valuable to know what your's are so that you don't fall into a rut. One of mine, for example, used to be a tendency to write short, one-sentence paragraphs. It came off as choppy to some people, so now I keep an eye on it. Another quirk I have is sometimes identifying speakers not by dialogue tags ("It's getting colder in here," Andy said) but instead by an action performed during or after the dialogue ("It's getting colder in here." Andy turned to light the candle behind him). My betas sometimes laugh at me for it.

Eh, good advice mostly.

Kudos.

My quirk is using odd speech tags. As well as using ellipses and dashes almost liberally.

Unless I'm still not welcome here...oh well.

I normally write short stories - so I try and play with formats of presentation. One of the things I've started doing is writing sections that are "every other". For example, section 1 set in the past, section 2 set in the present, section 3 set in the past, section 4 in the present. I also do that with characters.

People have also told me that part of my style is "describing without describing". I think my reviewer was drunk at the time, but who knows. I think what she meant was that I never say, "Character A was sad." I try and let his words and actions say that for me. Some people also say they get a "voice" to go along with my characters.

I don't know though, I really don't try all that hard when I'm writing, I just let the ideas take over and put it onto the paper.

---

D.N. Lyons, I remember you. We'll just keep our opinions to ourselves and everything will be fine.

This is a good rant. I'm sure I still have a million flaws I haven't yet managed to weasel out, but I've managed to start catching and fixing my overuses of mitigating adverbs like 'slightly' and 'vaguely' and damn does it feel good to do it.

I don't really know what my quirks are, though. confused I should probably figure that out soon.



That's a quirk? I-I thought that was normal. I do that all the time. Cuts down on repetitive 'he said, she said' without having to resort to flowery tags.