"What’s your biggest writing sin?" (r/writing)

If the character is doing something I don’t like, I’m gonna skip certain actions and imply that they happened.
Why, once I wrote a monster character pulling a human’s heart, but the action of pulling it out is gross, so I said what he did without describing how he did it. Why “he plunged his claws into the man’s chest, grabbing his heart.”
Then “the man’s body fell to the ground. (Character name) stood over him, his heart inside of his hand

Edit: I also write in French, because that’s my first language, but my teacher told me that I can’t start a sentence with “and” (in French “Et”, pronounced “ay”). So I have problems unlearning that. I started using semicolons, because putting commas didn’t feel right when I needed to end a sentence.
Edit 2: I write out my sign language. I have misophonia (a sensory disorder that makes visual and auditory stimuli hard to deal with), so if I’m having a bad day I learned sign language and forced my friends to learn.
Anyways, when writing dialogue, I often write the characters signing, even though they don’t need to sign.
My characters often accidentally develop extra pairs of arms to sign if I’m not paying attention.

I feel a lot of amateur writers worry overmuch about repeating words. Unless you use the word almost every sentence most readers won't notice.

I describe characters like I'm being forced to describe them.

An actual line from a short story I wrote for a high school English class: "She wore a spectacular gold dress, ornamented by a silver tiara and a pair of white high heels. Her blonde hair was neatly braided, and she was applying mascara around her baby blue eyes. Her skin was of a light complexion, with only a few freckles on her face that she wished she could get rid of."

It's just:
✅ Skin color
✅ Eye color
✅ Hair color/style
✅ Clothing style
And little, if any, further elaboration.

I absolutely HATE describing how characters look,
With setting im okay because I get to describe pretty landscape bit characters? Nuh uh If i ever post my writing ill have to add the art ive drawn of every character bc i cant even describe the color of this one characters hair without overthinking what an average person will think the color of it look slike

Oxford comma description sentences. I can’t stop listing three opinions, emotions, or attributes. See? I did it again!

Getting distracted / losing interest and dropping any fic before I'm even halfway through to anything 🥲

Adding way too many dashes

Mine would definitely be feeling the need to write in "transitional actions". The characters can't just go to sleep straight away, they have to change their clothes, brush their teeth, take off their makeup or shower. Omitting those details makes me feel like they're not there at all, and I can't have people thinking that the characters are just going straight to bed after being outside all day.

too much dialogue and too little description! i can make a whole ass story with only dialogue, but with description??? no way.

i also have no idea on how to move from an internal dialogue, if i start it, itwont end.

My flowery run on sentences that go way to into emotional introspection about everything -__-
'His dark eyes glow almost amber, lit ablaze with the possibility on the page before him, its almost divine in its elegance that look across his face, dogmatic love for knowledge and the written word.'
Hes reading a spell scroll not the manifesto of the universe

That or writing something needlessly edgy...
"He's like a cat basking in his own misery"
like tf

Also not finishing things and feeling that my rough draft needs to be treated like the final thing and not lose writing :/
I also cant spell for the life of me

Too many commas, no outline, starting way too many sentences with a pronoun

my outlines are often filled with things that i only hope will make sense when i go to actually write
for example, i'm currently working on a a few splatoon fics, and while the first two fics outline the plot pretty well with the occasional weird note, by the third fic i was starting to get tired and so that outline is more basic and contains things like "acht depression arc"

Mine is defaulting to cat like ways of speech. Like “he meowed” or “she hissed”. The warriors fan in me is way too strong

I’d say my worst sin (other than not asking for feedback… a topic for another day), is using my own made up words, and never elaborating on them. I use like, ‘Ranod’ which means agreeably random, or ‘soffy’ which is like saying “hah, you’re rather weak/ that of a puSHovEr” but in the context of a cat.
Probably leads to some confuzzlment but… will I fix these, no. :)

i have umineko narration. it cant just be "He lit a bomb. It exploded. He left." it has to be "He lit a bomb, walking away as it exploded behind him" or somethinf

the word eyes 76 times in 30.2k words (11 chapters) 😭

i thought i was doing so much better, i really didn't realize how often i mentioned eyes-- though, I'm sure a lot of it is probably chalked up to stuff in the vein of rolling eyes, or, like, x rubbing his eyes as he slowly wakes up; let's not forget, characters eyes wandering as their mind does the same; one of the character's bangs are left covering his eyes a lot of the time, and the other character really likes moving them out of the way to get a good look at him-- also with all of the crying, it's a little hard to avoid lmao

I'm only capable of writing dialogue. I'm terrible at combining dialogue and scenery together

Mine is that, not only do I not outline, I literally just have a small handful of plot points in my head and I just sit and type until I get there in a way that feels natural. I rarely plan more than a paragraph ahead. My current story arc was originally intended to be around 60k words long, I passed 60k words a while ago and am just now actually getting into the primary conflict because everything before that was character and plot setup for things I wanna do down the line. None of it planned, just straight off the dome

I use parentheses way to much and as long as the first and last letter of a word are the same I don’t catch it when I’ve written a different word and auto correct says nothing because it’s technically correct just not what I wanted 😭

I..... Forget to describe characters.

Annnd i don't ever use "..." because it's "too informal" for me but i REALLY want to use it (and "ALL CAPS" stuff)

I use "A bit" too much when I'm rping with a friend. I tend to have shy and reserved characters so any action that I wanna say that is a bit cautious and not super confident I use "a bit".

My writing sin is not putting enough "calm before the storms" inbetween my action/horror chapters it irks me so much I had to delete three chapters just to completely rewrite chapter 10 -_-

I always add either too much action or not enough action to my dialogue. My characters are either just standing around saying things with no indication of what else they’re doing, or they’re constantly nodding, sighing, shifting in their seats, blushing, cocking their heads, rolling their eyes, staring at each other… it can get a little ridiculous. I guess I’m at least doing better than this one guy my mom edited for once; he never had enough action in his dialogue, so my mom suggested he add some, and he came back to her with a rewritten scene that included, and I quote: “…he said, wearing his pants.”

Thinking my first draft is good. Also, I used to not indent at all and write in huge giant text blocks.

My obsessive need to have every chapter be at least 3500-4500 words. At LEAST. I will ramble on about a characters emotions and troubles for PARAGRAPHS just to get that down. I feel like a failure if I hit 3499 words or under and I can’t think of a way to make the chapter longer while still being relevant

I don't outline either. I just write a summarized synopsis and rawdogged the entire fic lol, sometimes I'll update the fic without even knowing what the next chapter and ending would be but it somehow always works.

Recently I've been writing a fic. One of the characters is currently stuck in a place where she can't come back to the place where the main cast of the fic is. However, I keep writing as if she's actually there and have to go back and fix it---

Writing first person and almost being sorta bad at it but not bad enough for me to stop

I abuse parenthesis. (Every paragraph has at least a few words in parenthesis.)

Starting a multi-chapter fic and then not updating it in centuries. Oh, and italics. Didn't know that was the word for them, but yeah. I often use italics to make damn sure the audience knows what word is the one I want them to focus on, lol. And 'as' is a word I use constantly to have a character say something while doing something else so I don't have to make it two separate sentences.

my characters sigh so often. I can't help it! They're all constantly exasperated! I sigh constantly, and by god, so will my characters.

I Like Excessive Writing When Reading Because It Drags Out The Story. Like Smut Wouldn't Exist If Excessive Writing Didn't Exist

I straight up copied the beginning of the series I loved, and then I tried to make it into a comic with one of my friends, I gave them absolutely NOTHING to work with besides designs. Not only that, but I wrote it like how I used to roleplay on Warrior cats games. Imagine reading something and all you see is;

~\\"wolfpaw? Are you okay?" Asked stormpaw//~"yeah" said wolfpaw\\~

I would just use weird symbols everywhere to make everything look 'aesthetic' or something, I'm not an experienced writer at all, but I know that this sucked.

here's mine, laid out in order of their magnitude:

1: near-unwavering perfectionism. it even affects things outside of my writing :)! can be easily remedied by not looking at the manuscript for too long.
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2: the deadly combo of being unable to write a coherent plot, and my continuous refusal to start outlining, no matter the good it would do me. mainly rears its ugly heads when i try to write something longer than a oneshot.
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--joint for number three are:
run-on sentences. in my experience, these come in two forms: commas where they shouldn't be (like here, apparently——>), and emdashes. and—
—poor placement of descriptive prose. i will often under-describe the appearances of characters, if at all, and over-describe other things. (namely, the setting.)
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4: just all-around being bad with pacing and exposition. for example: not providing enough context on virtually anything, leading to the whole thing being confusing as all hell for the reader (i would know, i've done this before).
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5: consistently failing to stick to a singular narrative voice. this one's a bit more recent, but it still counts.
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6: generally coming off as clunky and 'heavy' to get through, so to speak. great for sci-fi (which i happen to really like), not great for anything else.


and that's where this comment ends, because it's getting a bit too long for comfort. if you have any suggestions on how to fix these, please let me know, they would be very much appreciated :)

Nothing but dialogue all the time. My entire book would be mostly dialogue if I could get away with it.
That and rarely sharing anything of it with anyone ever. I need proofreaders but most of the unimportant stuff is mine only forever.
I also once wrote someone else’s fic in my writing style because I liked it but the formatting was boggling my mind or smth I can’t remember. I never published it and never will cuz it’s not mine, so it rots away in my drafts like hundreds before it.

I always have my characters repeating the same actions, I always use the same sentence structure to the point it gets kind of annoying when Im rereading it, I edit wayyyyyy too much instead of actually finishing the rest of the story, I tend to start new stories instead of finishing the ones I have or adding so much plot that it becomes way too much, I have a lot of writing sins

it's the endless semicolon and hyphen abuse for me; they're just too versatile!

I also do the em dash thing lol

— My First Sin

Nowadays, I write like this:

Sean punched Bob in the face, tears in his eyes as he screamed, “I don’t care if you’re my brother!”

However, I used to write like this:

Sean: (punches Bob) I don’t care if you’re my brother!

— My Second Sin

Whenever I’m writing for one of my fanfics, I have trouble deciding or not wether to describe things to the audience because I’m not sure if they know the source material.

In my head, if they’re new to the series, they can just Google it to see what a character looks like or what this setting is.

The only time I would describe something is if it’s a new character or a new location.

— My Third Sin

I have trouble writing when there’s lots of dialogue. The first chapter of my fics (assuming the fic just started) is usually the best written because my focus is on description instead of dialogue. I’m working on fixing this, but if you read any of the current chapters of my stuff, it’s lots of characters talking and not a lot of descriptions.

tbh i actually LOVE excessive description. also, overusing punctuation in general is my writing sin bc i'm not a native english speaker and i'm not used how less punctuation is used in english than in my native language

My characters are thinking too much about the things I am thinking about. Because they are obvious to me and so it feels unrealistic for them not to be obvious to the character. But the characters are not me!!! And they’re not omniscient!!! And maybe they have other things on their mind in the moment than contemplating their existence!!!! I have to force myself to delete a lot of those sentences but there are still too many.

Mine is the fact that u use too many commas. This was a problem during not only my writing, but my high school English classes. I just had too many ideas I wanted to write down, and I still do.

I love the ellipsis… too much

Run-on sentences, purple-prose and overly-descriptive narration. Perhaps a side-effect of me having a terrible problem with rambling in real-life, too.
Still not being 100% sure what the difference is between "affect" and "effect" and when to use one over the over.

But the problem I've had pointed-out the most by my readers is what comedian Dave Gorman has called the "Second-mentions Game". If I already used a certain word once in the previous overly-descriptive sentence, the next time that concept comes-up I will use any other synonym I can think of. Already said "gun" in the last paragraph? Now it's a "firearm". Already used that one two paragraphs ago? Guess "pistol" will suffice.
This is most apparent in that I will never use the dialogue tag "said" twice-in-a-row, lol.

My writing also tends to have its own "Wolf of Walfas-isms", unique to my works. Hard to explain, but there are definitely unique prose techniques I use that may even seem novel... the first time I use them within a given novel. By the hundredth time I've had - for example - the narration pose a theoretical nitpick of the story only to jokingly handwave it away, my readers are probably hoping I'll shut-up, LMAO!

Informing someone of their italics has the same vibes as; "Hey, did you know you're bald? " It's obvious, but someone still has to ask.

Over describing unimportant things.

Misspelling words on purpose. In my world, Magic is Magick and comic is comick. I like it like that. And my eventual readers will just have to get used to it.

Apparently, ending dialogue with a full stop instead of a comma.
"Like this." Instead of something "Like this," where the sentence is supposed to be continued out of the dialogue.

I don't care if it's correct, it just looks so deeply wrong that I never do it.