Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing

Helping authors achieve their dreams

Do you suffer from one of these writing maladies?

by

Writing maladies

(Commercial voice):

There are pernicious writerly germs out there infecting pages all around the world. Left uncured they can be fatal. Talk to your book doctor or literary health provider if you notice any of these symptoms:

Yoda Effect

Difficult to read, sentences are, when reversing sentences an author is. Cart before horse, I’m putting, and confused, readers will be.

Overstuffed Sentences

An overstuffed sentence happens when a writer tries to pack too many things into one sentence in convoluted fashion, making it difficult for the intent of the sentence to come through and to follow it becomes an exercise in re-reading the sentence while making the sentence clearer in our brains so we can understand the overstuffed sentence, which is the point of reading.

Imprecision

When writers just miss the target ground with their word using they on occasion elicit a type of sentence experiential feeling that creates a backtracking necessity.

Chatty Cathy

So, like, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but OMG teenagers use so much freaking slang!!! And multiple exclamation points!!! In a novel not a blog post!!! And so I’m all putting tons of freaking repetitious verbal tics into totes every sentence and it’s majorly exhausting the reader because WAIT I NEED TO USE ALL CAPS.

Repetition

Sometimes when authors get lyrical, lyrical in a mystical, wondrous sense, they use repetition, repetition that used sparingly can be effective, effective in a way that makes us pause and focus, focus on the thing they’re repeating, but when used too many times, so many times again and again, it can drive us insane, insane in a way that will land the reader in the loony bin, the loony bin for aggrieved readers.

Shorter Hemingway

Clipped sentences. Muscular. Am dropping articles. The death. It spreads. No sentence more than six words. Dear god the monotony. The monotony like death.

Non Sequiturs

Sometimes when authors are in a paragraph one thing won’t flow to the next. They’ll describe one thing, wow can you believe that thing that happened three days ago?, and keep describing the first thing.

Description Overload

Upon this page there is a period. It is not just any period, it is a period following a sentence. It follows this sentence in a way befitting a period of its kind, possessing a roundness that is pleasing to the eye and hearty to the soul. This period has the bearing of a regal tennis ball combined with the utility of a used spoon. It is an unpretentious period, just like any other, the result of hundreds of years of typesetting innovations that allows it to be used, almost forgotten, like oxygen to the sentence only darker, more visible. And it is after this period, which will neither reappear nor matter in any sense whatsoever to the rest of the novel, that our story begins.

Stilted dialogue

Character #1: “I am saying precisely what I mean!”
Character #2: “Wait. What is that you are trying to tell me?”
Character #1: “Are you frickin’ listening to me? I am telling you precisely what I am feeling in this given moment. And I’m showing you I’m really angry by using pointed rhetorical questions and petulant exhortations. God.”
Character #2: “Sheesh! Well, I’m responding with leading questions that allow you to tell me exactly what you mean while adding little of value to the conversation on my own. Am I not?”
Character #1:”You are totally doing that. You totally frickin’ are. Ugh! I’m so mad right now!”

The Old Spice Guy Effect (excessive rug-pulling)

The character was standing on a rug. He falls through his floor to his death! The rug was actually a trap door. But wait, the character was already dead. He merely faked falling through the trap door. But wait, the trap door was actually a portal into another world. The character was actually alive, he just thought he was dead. Now he’s really dead. Or is he? I’m in a chair.

Have you spotted any other writerly viruses out there in the wild?

See also: Do You Suffer From One of These Writing Maladies? (Part II)

Need help with your book? I’m available for manuscript edits, query critiques, and coaching!

For my best advice, check out my online classes, my guide to writing a novel and my guide to publishing a book.

And if you like this post: subscribe to my newsletter!

Art: The Doctor’s Visit by Jan Steen

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Bron says

    Yep, guilty of a few of these, especially Ink's Uncertainty Effect. I'd like to add one more:

    Backstoryitis – Particularly common on the first page of a manuscript, the main symptom is an excessive inclusion of backstory. This malady leaves the reader confused about timelines and wondering why the author started at this point in the first place. Treatment? Slashing and burning.

    I suffered from this one in spades on my first WIP. I'd like to think I'm getting better.

  4. Delia says

    Has anyone told you yet that this was funny?

    I torture my readers with overstuffed sentences which alternate with the Hemingway effect in a quirky little way that would most accurately be described as annoying. I'm working on it. Truly.

    Do you think Isaiah Mustafa will ever really come to terms with having spent all those years playing pro football only to be remembered as The Old Spice Guy?

  5. Terri Coop says

    @Marisa: I agree with dialogue-tag-itis. Especially when aggravated by adverbiosis.

    The best one ever was in a crit workshop. An epic fantasy. One of the characters was a sentient horse alien (roll with it). The sentence went something like,"we are safe," nickered Caballo.

    I have to confess, I suffer from ellipse-i-osis in social media settings. Sometimes, it just seems so appropriate . . .

    I would also like to point out the scrouge of poetry-sclerosis:

    The sun set across the plain in a burst of color agonizing to the eye as if ten thousand shades of some unimaginable spectrum from a forgotten dimension has been rescued from oblivion by a mad artist.

    It was dawn again by the time the writer finished describing the sunset.

    Best. Post. Ever.

    Terri
    http://www.whyifearclowns.com

  7. mishellbaker says

    I would probably laugh much harder at this post if "Repetition" didn't read so much like most of my first drafts. It's only funny when it's some other writer that sucks!

    Seriously though, woke the baby laughing.

  8. Katrina L. Lantz says

    ROFL! Seriously. Okay, not on the floor, but laughing nonetheless. I read this post backwards because I saw Old Spice Guy and just HAD to read. (Chatty Cathy much? Yeah, sorry.)

    But my point is that you, Nathan, need to put this post in a book, surround it with similar genius, and package it for me, the writing-how-to book collector. It would be my proudest tome. Seriously.

  10. scottwbaker.net says

    Now I want to write an Old Spice Guy story. Not a story, a poem, a bad poem that is only poetic because I say it is. But the world will love it and beat a path to my window. That's right, window. You thought it would be a door but it was not, for they cannot see through the door to bask in my brilliance. And bask they will until their eyeballs boil and spill to the ground. From that eyeball puddle will grow a tree and carved into that tree shall be the poem. And it will smell glorious.

    Or maybe not.

  11. Brad says

    This is brilliant!

    Although I think it shows what a Star Wars geek I am, because your Yoda sayings, understand easily, did I.

  12. Justajo says

    My fave overstuffed-on-purpose sentence writer: The Mogambo Guru
    Never fails to crack me up.

  13. Ishta Mercurio says

    HA-HA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

    Nathan, you are KILLING me! my face is going to take twice as long to heal. Two fantastically hilarious posts this close together IS too much to get without a little karmic balance, I guess.

    My eyes are tearing. Thanks for the post!

  14. Anonymous says

    You're an absolutely terrible man. Because of that last "malady," I just spent an hour of my life watching Old Spice videos on YouTube. <3 Isaiah Mustafa

  19. Frances says

    I recently wrote a short story, an historical set in Ireland in 1866. It's enough to say it was a 'hide the razor blades' type of tale. My problem was with the use of the homonym, or near homonym, to hilarious effect. I trapped three people in the kitchen and made them read. Two were happy with the story in a sad kind of way. The third burst out laughing…"Mary kept laying hens, and sold the eggs at the crossroads." He just couldn't get past Mary laying the hens and how does a woman do that? Another example I've read is a man in a supermarket being chased through the isle of crisps. I suppose he hit a double whammy, spelling and homonym.

  20. Elie says

    Funniest post ever. Hemingway in particular. In particular, I say.
    Ever read Raymond Queneau, Exercises In Style?

  22. Emma says

    I suppose I suffer the most from one malady – which isn't listed here (though it's probably a complication of overstuffed sentences) – which I like to call hypertangential subclauseitis – I've always enjoyed making up pseudo-words – sometimes to the point at which I can no longer remember which parts of my vocabulary (which has had the power to scare teachers since I was eight years old) are real and which are made up (although of course all words are made up in the end) – a habit which I inherited from my mother – this malady involves being so incapable of deciding which details to omit – after all, every detail is sacred (speaking of ejaculation as we were) – that I end up with a sentence which, were it written in a coding language – such as javascrapit or html (javascript, incidentally, is a bitch – yes, I appreciate that that's a little bit like a workman blaming her tools – for this) or any other tag-based language – it would have to end with several rows of indented hyphens and parenthesis just to ensure that all subclauses were correctly closed out – although it has to be said that I'm getting very good (well alright, quite good) at doing this automatically.

  31. Ann M says

    I wasn't able to read this until Wed. morning, but in a way I'm glad – what a wonderful way to start the day! Thanks, Nathan, for being so informative while also being so hilarious.

  34. SJBell says

    Reminds me of a yoda image macro that, unfortunately, is obscene and can't be posted here.

    Seriously, though, this kind of stuff comes up a lot in my work, but I'm usually able to spot it and root it out on revision. Which suggests that maybe the root cause is that people don't revise their work.

  41. Wanda B. Ontheshelves says

    How about an utter lack of interiority?

    Meaning, it's the end of the novel, one of the penultimate scenes! You've been building toward this scene the entire novel!

    And then when the character gets there, they have absolutely no thoughts, perspectives, opinions, musings, realizations, nothing. It's like when someone's angry, like after a party, and they're driving home, and A asks: "What's wrong?" and B says "Nothing," instead of "you were flirting with C all night," or something like that. The silent treatment.

    I think a novel really suffers when you unintentional structure it as:
    Chapters 1-19 What's Wrong?
    Chapter 20 Nothing.

    I mean, if that's how you MEANT to end your novel – but if it's because you just haven't gotten inside your character's head enough, to know what they would be thinking…aargh…

    I guess this is more of a plot malady than a writing malady…

  42. Robert Michael says

    Everything I ever wanted to know about writing I learned from Yoda, the Old Spice Guy and Hemingway. Oh, and JJ Abrams.

    Nice. Like, gag me with a period (spoon)!!! ACHH!

    Best post evah! Brilliant!!

  43. BonSue Brandvik says

    A lesson taught with humor is more likely to be remembered than one preached. Great post. Here's one more malady to consider:

    The Unfinished Thought…
    This happens when a character is distracted… or constantly interrupted… and never quite finishes a sentence… or thought… necessitating an endless… or almost endless… stream of dots… or other punctuation… or characters… that help us understand… or read… without ever spelling out the actual point… or thought.

  44. Anonymous says

    Funny.

    We should also exercise vigilance against viral imprecision's over-educated cousin, Vague Plague, a complex and insidious mutation with a particular predilection for academic writing, the effect of which is to hopelessly obscure a simple point with meaningless modifiers….

  47. Lacy Boggs says

    This is FANTASTIC. But the really interesting part is that a clever writer can use most of these techniques to good effect. It's only when they're overdone that they become plague-tastic.