Five Little Things That Bad Writers Do: Learn From Them

I’m not about to pretend I’m some kind of writing mogul. I just like to read fiction. As I read a fair whack of amateur written work, I get to read a disproportionate amount of badly written stories. Believe it or not though; this is an extremely good way of discovering what works on paper/in pixels and what doesn’t.

Here is a small handful of things I’ve come to try to avoid doing in my work, after discovering them in other people’s works. You want advice on what you SHOULD be doing? Pft; I’m no mogul!

1 – Adjectives

Adjectives are awesome. They add colour and flare to otherwise dreary prose… but don’t over do it. Additional, extraneous, supplementary and ancillary adjectives just tire the reader out (see what I did there?). One is better than none. Two may compliment each other. Three could be excessive. Four is way out there.

Unless you happen to be Anne Rice, most people will not appreciate hearing about the colour of your characters’ eyes every three sentences, or the way they smile that is oh so individual to them. Honestly, we don’t really need to know what they are wearing, you can ignore it now and then. Yes, I love Anne Rice; her descriptions of EVERYTHING go above and beyond… but she is a master of this technique, and has spent years perfecting it (and even makes fun of herself in her own work).

Us little amateurs want to start small. Think about what you are wanting your reader to envision, and find a few, choice descriptors. Remember that you’re painting a picture with your words, throwing a five buckets of various colours at the canvas may be considered modern art, but it makes for pretentious prose.

2 – Synonyms

There are no perfect synonyms in the English language. Each word has a slightly different meaning to any of its partners, especially within context. Simply taking the most interesting sounding word in the thesaurus’ list of synonyms could give a completely different meaning to what you want to say.

Take the simple phrase; “the sleek, black cat sat on the straw mat.”

Now, I could make this a little more interesting; “the elegant, sable moggy lounged on the rough rug.”

Or, I could throw my thesaurus at it; “the stylish, unlit grimalkin sat on the prurient, dried threshed grain stalk knot.”

Er… yeah. Sounds good, but it doesn’t really mean anything, at least it means something rather different to what I started with. You have no idea how often I read a sentence and can tell that the author does not actually know the meaning of the word they have used. It does not make them look clever, it does not make them a good writer… it just sort of makes them look silly. And makes me want to go read something else.

English has more words than any other language on Earth; please, please use them! Just make sure that you use the right ones.

As a side to this; “who” is a perfectly reasonable alternative to “whom” if you are not sure of when and where to use the latter. Using the wrong one makes you look like you’re trying to be clever without actually knowing what you are doing.

3 – Repeating Words

This really grates. Maybe it’s just me, but I hate it when a word, especially an adjective or verb crops up several times in the same paragraph… or, Heaven forbid, the same sentence. Obviously, there are times when this is unavoidable, or when you might want to do it for the sake of emphasis.

Example; The cat sat on the mat. It was rough on his rump, terribly rough!

Just don’t over do it; get a little variety into your prose and you’ll see your writing will be vastly improved.

4 – Paragraphs

Many modern readers can be very lazy (and I’m one of them). If they see a huge chunk of text they suddenly get rather bored. They put the book down, close the browser tab, dump the newspaper. There’s a good example; pick up a newspaper. How many sentences make up the longest paragraph?

Talk about short attention span!

Now, in a piece of prose, there should not be paragraph breaks every three lines just for sake of it. In fact that serves to make a work look as if it is written for a very young audience. However, breaking up your text not only makes it look more manageable, but the splits act as visual progress markers. Ever stopped half way through a page and lost track of where you were? How did you find your place again? You scanned the beginnings and ends of the paragraphs, didn’t you?

5 – Read Your Work

Finish it, then ignore it for a couple of days. Maybe start writing something else and put it completely out of your mind. Now, go back and read it as if you were completely new to it. See how many mistakes you made? Would you have spotted them if you had re-drafted it the same day you finished writing?

Today, I read through a piece I wrote a year ago. It was a good piece, and I was rather proud of some of the turns of phrase I used. Yet I found some glaring, horrible mistakes. They ranged from simple spelling errors to a character bouncing from using a box matches, to a lighter and back to matches (for no reason). I must have read this piece four times before I finally threw it at the public. Yet this is the first time I noticed the flaming continuity error.

Well, I hope there was something useful up there. Now, go away, let your wonderful imagination run rampant… then go back and reign it in a little with skillful word selections.

** I completely expect harsh criticism for anything horribley wrong (grammatically, spelling wise, my numerical abilities, etc) that may be in the above. Go on, do your worst, I dares yah!