Author Habits That Annoy You

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I won't name any names, any more than I named any names in my first post in this thread, but giving a book a title that's practically an open invitation for snarky remarks, and then objecting when the snarky remarks arrive, can be a little irritating. It can even make you want to postpone reading the opus in question.

 

[DonIago]

I won't name any names, any more than I named any names in my first post in this thread, but giving a book a title that's practically an open invitation for snarky remarks, and then objecting when the snarky remarks arrive, can be a little irritating. It can even make you want to postpone reading the opus in question.

Dark Passions has entered the chat?

 

[Avro Arrow]

I won't name any names, any more than I named any names in my first post in this thread, but giving a book a title that's practically an open invitation for snarky remarks, and then objecting when the snarky remarks arrive, can be a little irritating. It can even make you want to postpone reading the opus in question.

OK, I didn't think I needed to say this, but just to let everyone know, this thread is intended for author habits in their works. This is not an opportunity to make comments about other members' interactions on the board. If you want to criticize things in the books, fine. But the authors who post here are board members, the same as the rest of us are. Just like we don't allow people to make comments about other posters in the "Things that frustrate us all" thread in Misc, we're also not going to allow people to make comments about posters who happen to be authors in this thread.

So let's please not see any more posts like this. Thank you.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Fair enough, although annoying is annoying.

And I will freely admit to one of my own early habits, that annoyed my classmates when I took my one semester of Novel Workshop, decades ago: I had the annoying habit of expecting readers to possess, and to instantly engage, 1970s cultural referents, 30 years after the fact, and to instantly infer character motivations derived from attitudes that were far from universal, from an era before most of them were born. It didn't just annoy the readers, it turned them against my protagonist.

It took me a long time to realize what I was doing wrong, and what I could do to fix it.

 

[Emissary of the Prophets]

Wow! It's been a while since I have been on here. The OP didn't take any prisoners, did they?
While I am not going to pull apart their post, I am going make my own comment.
Each author has their own style and will use tropes to distinguish themselves from others. You have to bear in mind, they are playing in someone else's sandbox when they are writing tie-in novels. There are restrictions they have to follow, they also want to stand out. If all Trek novels were the same, they may as well be written by an AI.
I don't generally tend to over think things, I just want to escape the real world for a while, go with the flow and enjoy the ride.

 

[Mage]

Wow! It's been a while since I have been on here. The OP didn't take any prisoners, did they?
While I am not going to pull apart their post, I am going make my own comment.
Each author has their own style and will use tropes to distinguish themselves from others. You have to bear in mind, they are playing in someone else's sandbox when they are writing tie-in novels. There are restrictions they have to follow, they also want to stand out. If all Trek novels were the same, they may as well be written by an AI.
I don't generally tend to over think things, I just want to escape the real world for a while, go with the flow and enjoy the ride.

This. Totally this.
I remember someone once commenting that one author (not sure which one) used the word stygian once in all of his books and this person thought that was stupid.
Can you image disliking a book because it has one word in it?

 

[Zarm]

I remember someone once commenting that one author (not sure which one) used the word stygian once in all of his books and this person thought that was stupid.
Can you image disliking a book because it has one word in it?

I can't believe you used the s-word so casually on a family-friendly forum. Prepare to be reported!

 

[Greg Cox]

Don't get me started on folks who stop reading a book the minute they hit the f-word

Beyond that, all authors have their favorite words and turns of phrases. The trick is to not overuse them in the same book, story, chapter, or page.

But when it comes to the next book, or the one after that? The way I see it, the count resets to zero everytime I start a new work. Then it's just a matter of not using it too often in that book.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Each author has their own style and will use tropes to distinguish themselves from others.

Beyond that, all authors have their favorite words and turns of phrases.

And indeed, individual characters have their own quirks. Things they will say frequently, and things they won't say at all. Returning to my favorite protagonist in my own work-in-progress, the child-prodigy organist, she has three quirks: (1) whenever the subject of playing works that call for "swell" on organs that haven't a single swellbox, she'll speak of "thinking outside 'the box'"; (2) she categorically refuses to utter the phrase "pipe organ," as she feels it normalizes electronic imitations, and (3) she absolutely, positively, under no circumstances will laugh at any joke based on the idea of "organ" as a euphemism for "genitalia."

At any rate, I welcome characteristics that define the styles of various favorite authors. I know, for example, that when I pick up something by ADF, a "slow start" is virtually a "given," but if I stick with it, I'll be rewarded.

I wish I could point to some single characteristic that makes CLB's style recognizable. Or GC's. Then again, in music, a James Horner score is instantly recognizable from his use of brass (his best-known concert work, Collage, is aptly named, because it somehow sounds like all of his best-known film scores put together, without extensive quoting of any of them), but on the other hand, almost all the music of John Williams is recognizable, across all the different idioms in which he's written . . . because he's John Williams.

 

[Bryan Levy]

Beyond that, all authors have their favorite words and turns of phrases. The trick is to not overuse them in the same book, story, chapter, or page.

Aaron Sorkin’s “gather ye rosebuds” comes to mind.

 

[Greg Cox]

I limit myself to one "I'm a doctor, not a [SOMETHING]" per book.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

That doesn't bother me, as long as a variation of same isn't used every other sentence.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

That doesn't bother me, as long as a variation of same isn't used every other sentence.

Has that ever happened, outside of really off-the-wall fan parodies?

 

[Greg Cox]

On the all authors have their tics front, a funny story:

I recently had occasion to reread -- for the first time in more than forty years -- some old, unpublished stories I wrote for a writers workshop back in '84. Imagine my surprise to encounter a sentence that I had just written (again) that very day, in my current Work-In-Progress!

 

[DonIago]

Don't get me started on folks who stop reading a book the minute they hit the f-word

Beyond that, all authors have their favorite words and turns of phrases. The trick is to not overuse them in the same book, story, chapter, or page.

But when it comes to the next book, or the one after that? The way I see it, the count resets to zero everytime I start a new work. Then it's just a matter of not using it too often in that book.

Hmmm. So, I generally agree with this, though I once binge-read a single-author series...good books, went by quickly...and because I read them rapidly certain idiosyncrasies became apparent that I might not have noticed if I'd read more slowly or interspersed other books. Once I noticed them, every recurrence of them became just a little amusing and/or irritating depending on my mood at the time.

 

[Corran Horn]

On the all authors have their tics front, a funny story:

I recently had occasion to reread -- for the first time in more than forty years -- some old, unpublished stories I wrote for a writers workshop back in '84. Imagine my surprise to encounter a sentence that I had just written (again) that very day, in my current Work-In-Progress!

If you're going to steal, steal from yourself.

 

[Steve Roby]

If you're going to steal, steal from yourself.

Mystery writer Cornell Woolrich, when he was old and ill in the 1960s, resold a few of his older short stories to the mystery magazines, changing story and character names and making slight revisions to the text. I seem to recall reading that at least one editor knew what he was doing but bought the stories anyway to help him out. (Woolrich's books and stories were a big deal in the 1940s and '50s, and have been adapted into dozens of radio shows, movies, and TV episodes, Hitchcock's Rear Window being probably the most well known.)

 

[Christopher]

If you're going to steal, steal from yourself.

But at least try to rephrase it so it isn't too obvious -- like I tried to do this morning with a line in a short story that I discovered I'd inadvertently repeated nearly verbatim from one of my previously published works.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

But at least try to rephrase it so it isn't too obvious -- like I tried to do this morning with a line in a short story that I discovered I'd inadvertently repeated nearly verbatim from one of my previously published works.

You wrote it right once. You don't need to reinvent the wheel or make it worse just to avoid repeating yourself.

 

[David cgc]

You wrote it right once. You don't need to reinvent the wheel or make it worse just to avoid repeating yourself.

I don't know. You can't make it too easy for the future English major looking for overarching themes and motifs in your oeuvre by just using the same key phrases.