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Do you have any quirks as a writer?
A lot of writers have weird tendencies or quirks that come across through their projects. They create a lot of characters with similar traits, have strange writing styles etc.
Do you have any quirks or tendencies that make you unique as a writer? |
Flagrant overuse of semicolons
The inability to finish anything longer than a few thousand words An unhealthy obsession with latias Nope; none. |
All of my stories have that one idiot/punching-bag trope.
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I used to do semicolons a lot too, but lately I've been cutting down a lot. Otherwise, I tend to add extra cities/town in canon worlds if there's a call for it. If it's a made up town I like to add a bit character to them.
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Trying to be emotional and sentimental?
When I write my fic, I'll empathize myself into the mindset and thinking pattern of the focused character, in order to have a full grasp of how they will think and feel when certain situation comes up. Although I don't know how good the quality of my fic is at the end of the day, the only thing I knew is, I the author is becoming more and more like the characters in my fic. Sometimes when I'm so focused in the empathy, I felt like my mind is possessed by those fictional characters, my facial expression even changes accordingly to what "they" currently have in mind. |
Spend two minutes reading anything by Naomi Novik and you'll be using semicolons like your life depends on it. That woman's punctuation is out of control.
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So there's another thing you can add to my list: I can't write happy characters and I can't write humor. |
My characters tend to have opinions that shine through in the narration. I try to make the experience quite coloured, although I do sometimes at an all-knowing narrator. I don't think this is something unique perse, but it's something that's very characteristic of my style.
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I don't like my punctuation to line up with previous sentences. It's kind of hard to explain this one... but yeah. I also tend to not use the same words over and over a lot, but that always backfires on me. XC Also, all of my main characters have some sort of disability. It's usually autism because I'm autistic myself.
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Despite my apparent skill at writing dialogue, I have drifted away from writing a lot of it. Mostly what happens in my stories is the narration pauses as the characters spend a lot of time thinking.
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Funny you guys mention about not able to writing happy characters. When creating backstories for both canon and original characters, I tend to give them sad/shady backstories too. Usually though I give them happy endings because I'm like, "they deserve to be happy" haha. Only in rare cases where I have characters end still not feeling totally happy.
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Speaking of torturing characters, I don't think I've written anything where I haven't killed off at least one major one. I should probably cut that out.
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Actually, my writing has become pretty minimalist recently. I've been enamored with short stories that say a heck of a lot, like Earthsea, The Last Unicorn, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I'd like to write like that one day. I guess you can add that to my list? |
I should probably answer my own question lol.
I used to really suck at writing humour as well. Now it's still not my forte but when I choose to write humour I'm a lot more comfortable with it. I do however have a strong preference for writing darker characters and stories although not always those with particularly tragic backstories. When I write solo, I've also noticed a trend developing where I write a fair bit from the perspective of a character with little physical description given. I usually have a reason for this, but the weirdest part is that it's not always the same reason. I also write a lot in first person now, which is particularly odd because when I'm writing for RPs I always write in the third person. You'd think it'd be the other way around. |
I think a big reason as to why a common sentiment is "sad characters" and "dark pasts" is because stories inherently need conflict. A happy main character doesn't strife towards much, at least not in an interesting way. Mishaps, and try-fail cycles keep us so much more invested in a character or a story, than a be-happy character just rolling into better and better situations. There's only a few stories in which a character starts out happy, is happy throughout, and ends happy, because those stories lack conflict, and writing without conflict is incredibly difficult. Add on top of that, most people here are probably genre writers, and it's a lot easier to justify a dark past in a genre setting. I don't think there's anything wrong with unhappy characters. There's clichés associated with dark pasts, and troubled childhoods, but that those elements themselves are so fundamental that they aren't a cliché themselves.
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i use semicolons a lot but also dashes? i feel like they indicate a more jarring/urgent break than semicolons or commas, which is useful for flow. also i lack dialogue a lot? my writing falls toward the introspective.
none of my older concepts ever made it out of my notebooks, but i used to use basically the same extensive cast of characters all the time. i'd just collect them and have a database of people i could insert into whatever story/world came along that they woukd fit in. i mean, they and their backstories/personalities/abilities grew and changed from world to world but i still had the basic framework to drop into whatever. and i guess they all kind of fall into three categories- "bubbly and naive", "stoic and introspective", and "only sane man" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
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