Thursday, August 23, 2007

Writing pet peeves

I'm reading Stephen King's On Writing and he lists his writing pet peeves as does Mr. Strunk from the famous little writing book Elements of Style.

Here are a few of mine...

I concur on the horrors passive writing, however I write passively more than I should.

The word "suddenly" bothers me. In a movie, suddenly works because all of the sudden there is something there, but in books, things just don't suddenly happen. The reader reads at the same pace and to use the word suddenly seems rather silly. Just say what happened and then how surprised people's reactions were.

I dislike headhopping, switching between different perspectives often. I caution writers to be especially careful when people of the same gender are involved. When so many "shes" or "hes" are involved it becomes confusing and sometimes overuse of creative pronouns can be irritating as well. I personally like when each scene is written from a different perspective, much clearer to read and understand.

Too many names. Only name the characters that warrant a name. Too many names is confusing, especially if they start with the same letter or sound. To elaborate on this, only give really important characters last names.

I'm sure I will come up with more for later but that's it for now.

1 comment:

Sean said...

Yeah, but even really successful writers do dumb things like htese sometimes. I was well into the second Lord of the Rings books before I realized Sauron and Sauruman were different characters! D'oh!