10 Things to Avoid in Your Writing

1. Avoid using flowery language to make yourself look clever.

This can be confusing for readers and is unlikely to have the desired effect. Instead, write the way you’d speak to someone in real life – not using informal English, but natural and flowing.

2. Avoid using generic descriptions.

Readers need to be able to visualise what they’re reading. Using nouns like ‘home’ or ‘tree’ don’t give the same visuals as words like ‘flat’, ‘double storey’, ‘log cabin’ or ‘great oak’.

3. Avoid using character names too often in dialogue.

When speaking to each other, most people don’t use the other person’s name that often. Most of the time, people only use another person’s name in real life to greet the person, to get that person’s attention, as an exclamation of shock or surprise, and perhaps every now and then. It’s unrealistic and annoying to read a conversation between two characters in which they address each other by name in almost every dialogue section.

4. Avoid using redundant descriptions.

For example, if the music is blaring, it’s a given that it’s loud, so if you write ‘it blared loudly’, the word ‘loudly’ is redundant.

5. Avoid swapping point of view (POV) in the same scene.

While many find it acceptable to write in God Mode these days, I don’t like this POV, as it can confuse readers too easily. Rather, choose a character from whose POV to write from in each scene, and stick to that character’s thoughts and observations for the duration of the scene.

6. Avoid info dumps in narrative.

Obviously, you need to share a certain amount of information with your readers. However, in cases where the information is long-winded and detailed, try to split this up across a few scenes, or add it in dialogue rather than narrative. In narrative, it can feel like an info dump that might bore readers (after all, they want the story more than the information). When you add the information to dialogue – say, one character explaining how something works to another character – you can add character interactions and give readers an indication of those characters’ personalities and relationships with each other at the same time, thereby making the information-giving more entertaining.

7. Avoid using clichés.

Avoid it like the plague. Seriously. Clichés are boring and unoriginal. Rather, use more interesting comparisons that you thought up yourself. This will entertain your readers a heck of a lot more than a well-known cliché, and they’ll be more likely to remember you for it if the comparison is good[V1] .

8. Avoid plagiarism in any form.

This might sound obvious, but many writers don’t realise that using song lyrics and quoting other authors’ work in their writing is considered plagiarism just as much as putting your name on another author’s manuscript. It’s okay to refer to songs by title, but, if you really want to include lyrics, rather make up your own. If you desperately want to use existing lyrics (I don’t recommend it), get written permission from the copyright-holder.

9. Avoid passive voice.

There are times when passive voice works better than active voice, but, most of the time, it just slows down the story’s pace and can often lend confusion. For example, rather than write ‘the food of the cat’, write ‘the cat’s food’.

10. Avoid using the same sentence structure too closely together.

While there are only so many ways to structure a sentence, avoid using the same structure too often too closely together. It makes the writing feel repetitive and boring, and takes the reader’s attention from the story. An example of this is: Slowly, he opened the door a crack. Cautiously, he peeked through the crack and looked down the path. Amazingly, no one was there.

5 Quotes for all Writers to Live By

1. “You fail only if you stop writing.” ~ Ray Bradbury

2. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ~ William Wordsworth

3. “Our words must seem to be inevitable.” ~ William Butler Yeats

4. “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” ~ Anaïs Nin

5. “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you're inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” ~ Mark Twain

More About How And Why I Write

As it turned out, being rejected by traditional publishers was a good thing, and the boom in self-publishing came along at just the right time, or the books would probably never have been published. Perhaps the worst part of the traditional publishers’ rejections was that they didn’t give reasons for them, except one, which said the familiar idea was too similar to another book they were publishing, although those familiars were all insects. Self-publishing has allowed me complete artistic control and enabled me to offer the books at low prices, so I’m happy about that. I’d have had huge problems with editors telling me to change stuff.

I think one of the reasons The Queen’s Blade is hard to predict is because it has no plot. It’s just a series of events based on the characters’ decisions and the consequences thereof, and I don’t always like what they get up to. They told the story, though. I’m just the ‘scribe’. The ideas Blade came up with and the lies he told had me gobsmacked. He’s a lot cleverer than me, and definitely much more devious.

I enjoy all aspects of writing. It’s my favourite thing to do. When I’m in the ‘zone’, it’s like I’m in that world, with the characters, watching and listening to them, and, depending on whose point of view I’m channelling, sharing their thoughts, too. Some writers say it’s best only to write from the main characters’ points of view, but I have no choice in the matter. It allows me to escape the harsh reality of my humdrum existence. I much prefer imaginary worlds, which is probably why I spend so much time there!

When I’m channelling, the only thing that slows me down is my typing speed, and sometimes I go back and embellish descriptions later, if the story’s moving particularly fast when I channel, but most of the time I manage to describe things pretty well the first time around. I find I can ‘pause’ the story if I need to describe the surroundings, but sometimes I want to get on with it and find out what happens next.

The really weird thing is I can’t change anything! When I edit, I sometimes think of a better way to describe a certain scene, without actually changing what happened, but then I always change it back again. It just isn’t right any other way. I can enhance background info, but not actions or conversations. Also, sometimes I’m asked why something happened the way it did, and I have to figure it out, because I honestly had no idea when I wrote it. I also get information that I have no knowledge of, things I’ve never done or learnt about, yet when I research it afterwards, I find that what I’ve written is correct. It’s kind of creepy.

Why I Write, And My Method

So many people have asked me why I write, and what my process is. The first is simple: I write because I enjoy it so much, and so that I can read the books again. They gathered dust on hard drives and floppy disks and then stiffy disk backups for over 20 years, and some were lost due to corrupt backups, a stolen PC and a crashed laptop. I had no plans to even try to have them published in the beginning, but, after writing so many, I decided to give it a bash. No one else had read them, at that stage. Self-publishing was easy. Marketing was the hard part, but I didn’t expect much, so I made the first books free and left the rest up to fate.

My writing process is also very simple: I just watch the film in my mind. I totally lose all track of time when I’m writing. I’m in that world, not this one. I only stop when my coffee mug runs dry and for potty breaks; things that drag me back to reality because they have to be urgently remedied, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to drink from an empty mug. My longest stint was fourteen hours, from about ten pm to midday the following day, during which time I wrote over twelve thousand words – which I only discovered when I stopped.

I wrote the prequels to The Queen’s Blade a few years after I finished the series, at the suggestion of a fellow writer. Writing them was quite strange for me, because I already knew some of what had happened from Blade’s memories, which is not normal for me. I don’t feel like the books are the result of my skills and ideas. It’s like I’m a chronicler, and the stories come from somewhere else. When I’m writing, it’s as if the story downloads into my mind while I’m doing everyday things, and then I purge it into the computer. Sometimes I’ll get a lot, and sometimes not so much, and I just have to read a few pages of what I wrote the previous day to get hooked back into the channel again, and then it just flows. The story kind of grinds to a halt after a few hours, either because I’ve purged the download for the day or because I’m too tired, then I go to bed.

The next day, the process happens again. The story in my mind stays on hold until I write it, so I won’t get more until I’ve written that part, nor will it disappear. I can’t even access it until I write it. I just know it’s there. So a typical day when I’m writing is pretty ordinary until I ‘zone out’, which I prefer to do at night, when it’s quiet, which makes me nocturnal.