So recently I came across an old USB drive of mine when cleaning my desk. Upon plugging it into my computer, to my delight, I found that it contained tons of my old writing and stories that I had written awhile back. And while I was happy to stumble across this little piece of my writing history, I was hit with a realization: my writing sort of sucked.
This didn’t bother me mind you; I was like 11 writing the majority of these stories, but I also couldn’t help but notice a few writing mistakes that I tended to make consistently. Some of these I still struggle with and some of these I have moved past but regardless I found it beneficial to note them and state them in this blogpost in hopes that someone else making these same errors could get some advice or find this constructive to their own writing.
Enjoy my analysis of my flaws.
Not utilizing paragraph breaks.
Or if I did, I used them incorrectly. I think this just comes with more practice where you get a better feel for when it is the correct time to press “enter”, but at this time in my life, I did not have such a sense. I either do not utilize paragraph breaks enough, resulting in long, sprawling pages of text or I used them awkwardly where it didn’t even seem to fit. The rule, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is to press enter and use a paragraph break every single time the “camera” changes in your story. This means someone else begins to speak, an unrelated action occurs, or a new line of thought comes into play.
Too many dialogue tags.
My writing didn’t flow for a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons it all felt so janky was I used waaaaay too many dialogue tags when writing. This caused the conversations to feel choppy and jilted and not at all natural.
“He said.” “She said”. “They said.”
Too many saids. Sometimes you should omit the tag and simply write what the character is saying only. Besides, a good writer makes characters that you can tell is speaking, simply by how they talk, not just by the “said” that the writer tacks on at the end.
Not enough dialogue tags.
There were a few times however, that I omitted the tags entirely too much. Certain stories I guess I simply didn’t care enough about and barely added any tags at all. In some cases, as I’m sure you can imagine, this became all too confusing and it was hard to keep track of who exactly was talking at times, especially when the conversation involved more than two characters and it wasn’t a sort of back and forth exchange.
Pro Tip:
Read your writing out loud, but especially the dialogue bits to make sure they flow.
Being overly flowery in my writing.
Another error of mine was just being plain pretentious in my writing style. How did I do this? By overly describing EVERYTHING and utilizing long (but admittedly fun) words. While I do remember finding this a fun way of writing, feeling almost like I was writing the script of a nature documentary for a British dude to read, it admittedly did not make for great story telling. My writing felt fluffy and long winded. So unless you’re specifically going for that pretentious vibe, I’d try and avoid it.
Being redundant (failing to expand my vocab when it came to words I use a lot)
There are just some words I struggle to find stand-ins for but it would have definitely benefited me to look up a list of synonyms for the word “smiled” before I ever wrote ANYTHING. My advice to you is know the words you tend to regurgitate and before you even start writing, look up or compose a list of alternatives to resort to later when you feel you’re repeating yourself way too much.
And that’s it! Those are all the main issues I found with my earlier writing. And while I’d love to say the stuff I put out now is WORLDSSSS better, I would venture to say it isn’t. Despite having written for 6 more years, I still find myself struggling with much of the same stuff, especially when it comes to the issue of redundancy. This goes to show that we will never be perfect as writers but that still doesn’t mean we can’t improve. And we do that by knowing our downfalls and, probably most importantly, continuing to practice and hone our craft.
Happy writing!
By the Brooke 