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

Mine would be So. Many. Commas. They aren't "run-on" anymore, they're "ran away, started a family, raised children, those children had children, and their children had children" sentences

Starting sentences with 'and'. It just sounds better sometimes. Also, using the word 'sighed'. My characters just end up sounding so done with life.

My biggest writing sin is not asking for feedback. Not in a "my writing is so good I don't need readers" way, but in a "my writing isn't ready to be seen by other people" way. Usually because I feel like I haven't written enough.

For the "suddenly" thing: replacing it with synonyms doesn't fix it, because you're describing something that you don't need to describe! If something happens suddenly you can just make it happen, prefacing it with "suddenly" makes it less sudden, just saying that it happened makes it actually sudden for the reader

I constantly fit too many things happening simultaneously in one sentence, connected mostly through commas: "X spoke shyly, tail flicking as they averted their eyes and shuffled closer, a small smile tugging at their lips"

My worst sin is how I write exclusively for myself (I'm too shy to even show my friends) but I still act like it's being posted for the whole world to see. I literally will rewrite a sentence for 10 minutes before moving on, so I hardly get any writing done.

My sins are a buffet of loads of these in a minor form: A little bit of purple prose in my life. A little bit of commas everywhere by my side. A little bit of alien-in-disguise syndrome's all I need. A little bit of sentence fragment's all I see. A little bit of excessive description in the sun. A little bit of stealing all night long. A little bit of conjunctions, here I am. A little bit of these makes writing a jam.

Having "quickly" as a crutch word. Everyone's in a rush, I guess!

Well my Swedish teacher can vouch for me in this. But I have a nasty habit of making every main character extreamly depressed. Like I physically can not write a happy ending. If you want examples. First story I wrote in class free of will I made the main character who was a child depressed and die in the snow. Second story I made was of a teen that ended up in a abusive relationship and killed her best friend. Then there was a ”continue the story” assigment. I made the main lead off himself and his girlfriend live with guilt the rest of her life. The rest of my writing assigments are similar and can be up to around 6 pages long. Sorry for the rant but I wanted to share it. (=^•-•^=)

Honestly, I think my greatest writing sin is excessive world-building. My main project, that I’ve been working on for years, has its own countries, politics, religion, cultures (plural!), calendar, holidays, everyday religious practices, and a mass amount of lore in general, even down to each character. I have roughly 200 side characters (so far) and all of them have a detailed personality, at least a rough outline of their life history, hobbies, favourite and least favourite foods, preferences in style, temperatures, weather, it goes on and on and on. There are so many little facts about each character - and that’s not necessarily bad, because I mostly write Slice of Life and the characters *are* the story, but it can be excessive. I honestly considered making side stories just to include more of the stuff I’ve written. There’s just so much I’ve made.

I'm just a crybaby. I cry very easily. And my characters do, too. Crying is reserved for one (1) super emotional, heartwrenching or heartwarming scene per character, usually. Well, my characters cry almost every time something happens. Saw a deer in the woods and it was beautiful? Got called a rude word? A friend said they support you? Remembered your past? Go home and cry about it. I edit most of the tears out the second time around haha.

One of my writing sins is using Canadian and American English. I bet I've used "favourite" and "favorite" in the same paragraph before.

The “never finishing stories, keep starting new ones” called me out so hard.

I cannot write a character without including animal-like traits. I’ve been into xenofiction since a child, and I’ve hardly ever read any books with human protagonists- this has caused my characters to have very animal or at least, non-human behaviour and traits. One of my characters hisses like a snake, another jumps whenever they’re startled by a noise. And whenever a character is angry, there’s always got to be a growled or hissed somewhere.

4:11 reminds me of that scene in Death Note- "I'll solve equations with my right hand and write names with my left. I'll take a potato chip... and eat it!"

Accidentally writing the same word twice just after the first. Like, I once made a birthday card for my little sister which had a slightly rewritten version of the lyrics of shooting star from Barbie star light adventure, and I wrote it as "you light light up my whole world because you shine so bright." I still kinda cringe thinking about it.

So many of these sins are just "things I find fun about writing and appeals to my interests and taste in fiction but have been arbitrarily conditioned to view as inherently bad"

I haven’t wrote anything in 4 years, until literally a week ago I felt so cuddly I HAD to get it out by writing a fluffy fic, since I struggled with artblock. That was a weird but interesting experience. You gotta switch between art and writing once in a while, I think it’s good for the brain. I realised writing is hard for me, but I enjoyed the process.

I have a thing for making characters go swimming.

“just” i say just so much and then i read it over and i hate it because every paragraph i say just. like, “he was just doing this” “just this” “just that” ahhh

Well, if comics count: •I use too many commas •I make the dialogue extremely formal, even though it's usually between friends.

this is going to be relatable. I commit so many writing sins.

Improper use of the smegsy tag in first person pov.

My ADHD and low attention span can be seen in my writing, thats my sin. I would be accidentally info dumping in a paragraph because something vaguely came up

The phrase " A rock of anxiety settled in (his/her/their) stomach" I don't know when or why I started using this but it pops up in every single one of my writing projects at least three or four times.

My main writing sin would be a lack of description. Also mixing up commas and periods. But because of the lack of description, readers aren't being allowed to 'see' what's going on, I barely even describe appearances! I tend to go heavier on dialogue and character's emotion, inner thoughts, etc. I don't build their world, I just build how they live in it. I found writing fanfic to be enjoyable as I'm not under as much obligation to world build lol

Right from the get-go, the long sentence abuser thing is relatable. However, Russian is one of my mother tongues, and it has long-ass sentences so I’m not that harsh on myself about it.

These are so relatable it hurts me phisically, i commit a bunch of these sins But my biggest sins are both, not finishing my stories AND starting new stories without finishing the last one, i just have too many ideas but never dive deep into them, i think "i could be writing a slice of life romance with the childhood friends theme i started a year ago, but i also kinda wanna write aboud one of those overused yet still somewhat iteresting superhero school, or i could also write this sci-fi story about this guy that travels through space to come back to the earth" but i never settle in anything and end up doing something else instead of writing. It's that and i also get frustrated because i can't visualize my characters, i say that i'll try to learn how to draw first but that's a LONG process and i'm not patient enough so i just get frustrated and do nothing

White room syndrome and what ever the equivalent for character description is.

I use the words “and”, “as”, and “and then” too much. I’ve discovered problems with my writing from this video. I also make my stories too short, and when I do try to make them long, I give up because of boredom. I also use pronouns too much. And when I’m writing in first person, I use the word “I” too much. But, I’m more of a beginner and I don’t even publish books. It’s just a hobby.

I love hearing about writers who have exact opposite problems to mine. It makes me want to do a collaboration. If you can write the action, I’ll write the dialogue. If you can do the world building, I’ll come up with a plot. Maybe we don’t all have to be the perfect writer on our own, we could all play to our strengths and make one great story out of many small pieces. Like Voltron, connecting a bunch of giant robots to make an even gianter robot. On that note, I may need someone with a better knack for metaphors.

Having my characters, no matter where they’re from, saying y’all. I had a robot say it in a Mitchell’s vs the machine fic, and a reader said they now always reads that character with a southern twang.

Mine would probably be descriptions that are too vague

I’m a rising college senior who has to finish two screenplays this summer, and I have spent my first month at home primarily doing two things: watching RU-vid and sleeping.

Mine might be no dialogue. I just write out sentences and no speech is included at all.

My biggest writing sin is chapter length. When writing, it feels like it’s longer than the Bible. When I read it over quickly to make sure it all makes sense, it’s shorter than a Mem Cake poem. 😅

I don't write (fiction) a lot (and post even less to the public), but my biggest "sin" is probably that I am purely driven to write two things: 1) character dialog, or 2) a handful of very vivid scenes from one or two perspectives World building? Plot in between those scenes? It might exist, but I can't put it into prose. Messy bullet point notes, maybe, but not in the same way I can write 500 words for a 3 minute interaction between two people if I'm inspired.

Mine is probably putting my own spin on Tarantino's habit of putting feet in his movies. Instead, I put tickling in everything I write LOL

I just posted my first piece of writing online yesterday, and... does the feeling of wanting to crawl into a hole and die whenever someone reads it ever go away?

Using a thesaurus and then finding a word I know no one will understand but still putting it in anyways. I was editing my fic and I cringed when I found one of those words I added because I thought it would sound cool. But I looked at it again and was like nope. Nah uh. I changed it. Also I tend to overshare or overwrite a lot. Especially with dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue is so frickin heavy and I forget to add other things. But that's something I try to be more cautious of now and I always try to remind myself not to just write dialogue. But literally a lot of my ideas comes from a piece of dialogue that I came up with in the middle of the night. Also another thing is rereading over chapters a lot before even thinking of moving onto the next one.

When I'm writing two characters' dialogue when they're speaking back and forth, I have to ALWAYS say who is talking and how they said it afterward. Even though it's not necessary most of the time and will flow better without it. You can tell who's talking after the first two pieces of dialogue due to the paragraph breaks, and yet I still do this. Example: "Are you okay?!" Hunter cried. "Yeah, I just hurt my arm." Willow replied. "Titan, that looks bad. We should take you to the healing ward." Hunter suggested "I'll be fine... it's just a little blemish. I've taken harder hits during Flyer Derby before." Willow insisted "Are you sure...?" Hunter asked. "Yeah, I can use my arm just fine." Willow said with a nervous smile. "...Okay then. Just be careful, promise?" Hunter pleaded. "I will." Willow promised. VS. "Are you okay?!" Hunter cried. "Yeah, I just hurt my arm." Willow replied. "Titan, that looks bad. We should take you to the healing ward." "I'll be fine... it's just a little blemish. I've taken harder hits during Flyer Derby before." "Are you sure...?" "Yeah, I can use my arm just fine." "...Okay then. Just be careful, promise?" Hunter pleaded "I will." Willow promised. ***** The second one just flows better, yet I still inist on doing it the other way. Why? I dunno, I think im afraid of readers losing track of who's talking?? This is just one side effect of my main writing sin, adding way too many unnecessary details to everything and anything.

I am sooooo guilty of the dialogue thing. I absolutely love telling stories via dialogue. Also, I have a nasty habit of basically self-insert hijacking characters. I don't publish anything anymore because it doesn't seem fair to readers but...

mine is writing dialogue and forgetting to describe anything, its something ive gotten better at avoiding with practice but the whole scene is so clear and detailed in my head (almost like an actual video playing in my head) that i tend to forget that people wont automatically know what im picturing more accurately my writing often becomes unconciously auditory focused because i dont see in words but characters talk in words and sounds can oftem be conveyed by onomatepoeia

this gonna be a good one

Personally, my sin is pretty much refusing to describe EVERYTHING. For this one fanfic I’m writing I had to literally force myself to describe a character’s house’s floor plan because otherwise if anyone reads it they wouldn’t know where the character is going in their house

100% my two biggest writing sins are over describing eyes and repeating scenes. For eyes, for some reason that's my go to way to describe an emotion or reaction, and it unfortunately gets repetitive really fast. With repeating scenes, since I've been working on my WIP for 2.5 years, I often forget what has and hasn't happened in my book, so I tend to write scenes that have in essence already happened. Either that or I'll forget I haven't written a scene yet and pretend the audience knows exactly what I'm talking about.

I think mine would be giving plenty of development to my favorite characters and things mainly associated with and then leaving the rest seemingly underdeveloped compared to the favs. Along with the fact of forgetting about the entire arc plan all together and keeping that in mind

I am mainly a fan fiction writer so my writing sin is the absence of character description. I’m very used to the notion that when I write a name known to the fandom I am writing for that they’ll already know what they look like, so I don’t choose to describe it for fear that I’ll dilute the pacing of the story. I also have a habit of killing off characters because… why not?

For me: 1. Worrying that the chapter isn’t long enough and I need more description so I add random details. (But I’m working on this) 2. Having a planned out plot for every chapter in the story and then not following that plot and the storyline changing dramatically.

My worst writing sin is the way I do descriptions. I've never been great with descriptions and prefer doing lots of dialogue for that reason. When I do have to do descriptions, however, is when things get weird. At the start of a writing session, I could be doing full descriptive paragraphs with semi-decent showing not telling. Then I get burnt out, and all the flowery language from before disappears. Yet I keep on writing despite this.

My habit of forgetting I just described something a paragraph ago to try and do it again really is a sin at this point. I have to re-read it myself, then read it out loud, then plug it into an accessibility tool for the blind to have that read aloud to me to be sure I didn't describe the cut of the crystal 400 times. Or found a way to loop back around and do the same introspective dance I did at the top of the page. Or add how the character was wearing a red robe every-other time the character is mentioned. I'm not trying to talk down to my audience, they can follow along, I just forgot I mentioned it already.

One of my many sins is that I don't write *enough* description. I'm the type of person who can't really imagine what places look like, and I'm bad at describing stuff anyway, so in my fanfiction work (I don't really care if it's good or bad) I usually give just the basic place like "hospital" or "a park with a lake that has a bridge over it". I like to think that this allows each reader to have their own idea of what the place looks like. With characters I try a little bit more, but even with them I just want to focus on dialogue and how the characters are feeling. I'm currently obsessed with the idea of small stories that just look at how humans react to things like loss and tragedies (too bad I'm way too lazy to write lol)

I'm a chronic hyphen abuser. If a word can be hyphenated, it will be. If I can use it to join sentences together instead of a comma or a semicolon, I will. I need to specifically comb through my work and double check I don't keep repeating the same sentence structures by using hyphens too much.

Mine would be starting character dialogue with “well”. I only realized this was an issue when one chapter of my WIP had almost half of the lines in start with it. Also, overuse of ellipsis (you know, the “...” thing) in dialogue. I try to use it only when a character is thinking or briefly pausing, but when revising I end up seeing it in every other line.

• Overusing qualifiers like just, even, almost-sometimes they're useful, and they're super common in normal speech, but it softens the impact of a line and can come across as me being uncertain in my own writing. • Commas. I hear a pause in my head, I put a comma. Grammarly disagrees, but I'm right. • Not a sin as such, but: dialogue first, environment second. I cannot create images in my brain (aphantasia, baby!) but I have an excellent auditory mind palace. I can tell if dialogue has a good flow, or if phrases come across clunky without ever reading them aloud. Sometimes, I'll get six lines of dialogue deep and realise I forgot to put the characters in a set of any kind. I've become adept at writing scenery, it just tends to come second in the creation process. • Overthinking. I don't write outlines as such, but every choice I make is one I consider at... great length. The only exception is puns. Those fuckin things pour out of me like a Puninator 3000 and I'll find them on second- or third-reads and go "haha nice". • Alliteration. I've been minorly called out for this all my life, I can't help throwing a million alliterative sentences in my writing. I'm sure I'm just hyper aware at this point, but I must have learned about alliteration when I was really young and absolutely fallen in love because I can't resist their pull. As for my Writing Heavenly Virtues, I love rereading my work and finding joy in past projects. I'm nearly 23, I get to laugh without judgement at the stuff I wrote when I was 14 and get good vibes from seeing how far I've come since then. I found a story I wrote when I was 6 called How Santa Got Rudolph, and it is PEAK fiction. There's a vampire in the story, and I don't even know how I knew about vampires at 6, but he's there! Imagine if I'd thrown it away in my edgy teen years, I'd never get to relive the thrill of the very very very big vampire whose presents were stolen by a lonely three-headed dog! Truly the darkest timeline.

I used to (and kinda still do) make characters do meaningless little actions to make the writing sound better. For example: “Hey Nora, did you get the basket?” Nora nodded. “Got it right here.” She lifted it up the basket and showed it to Winter. Did that nodded need to be there? No, but it made the pauses between to dialogue sound nice. And that’s the problem. I give way too much of a shit about the pauses between words to make it sound better when I’m reading it in my head ;-;

Mine would probably be that I avoid writing dialogue like the plague. Another one is that I have a (very strict) rule for myself that I can’t use a characters name more than twice on one page except for dialogue, which, again, I don’t write a lot. That can be a problem because I like to start my stories with only one character present and have to find a lot of ways to describe around his actions rather than just writing „he did…, his thoughts…, he walked“. Also, writing sentences that are wayyy too long. Edit: not necessarily a writing sin, but English isn’t my first language and I’m really insecure when it comes to grammatical errors and literal translations of figures of speech (because those rarely work out when you just translate them) and care about them even in first drafts, which means that writing takes me more time than it probably could.

I think I have what I like to call “bullet point syndrome” where I write stories as if they are a bulleted list, a series of events, rather than a story. It’s similar to the lack of description problem; I have so many events condensed into just a few paragraphs or sentences because, while I am a storyteller at heart, I am an awful _writer,_ in reality. Example: “He stabbed her. He left the room. He drove home. Then it was the next day.” I didn’t have anything interesting about that scene, but it needed to happen, so I just wrote down the events in sequential order like I was a detective taking notes on a crime. Because I only like indulging in the fun parts of the story 😅

Mine is definitely adding too much detail on setting, not enough expression in character dialogue to the point where I wonder if they’re getting to OCC. Like, describing the exact shades of yellow light through the exact shape of the window of the exact state of a room. Oh and there’s a picture taken on this exact day when this exact detail happened. Too much. My characters also end up speaking like: “I have to leave now,” they said. They sound so boring and OCC…but other verbs don’t fit

i can't get rid of dialogue tags. every line of dialogue is followed by "they said." i always feel like it's unclear who's talking without them!

Mine is not knowing proper English punctuation, especially when it's about speech. Also always forgetting letters in words that are almost the same in my native language and not noticing it at all. Also accidentally making every character autistic, since I'm auistic. Using the word "really" way too much. And, the worst of all: I can't paragraph for the life of it. I make either too little or to many paragraphs. There's no inbetween. Either wall of text or a linebreak every three sentences.

I say to hell with plot outlines. I couldn't stand it in ELA when we had the creative writing project and I would be forced to use those plot outlines and would never follow my own. I write like "I know how I want it to start and how I want it to end, fuck the map we'll just see how we get there" and it annoys all of my teachers

I’m allergic to the word said and I always end up writing too much dialogue. Just imagine the cringe born of these problems in conjunction with each other

I need more synonyms for "smiled". Or another way to express the same idea. I use "smirked", "grinned", and "chuckled" too much

The sin I'm currently struggling the most with (aside from starting too many projects and jumping into them without thinking whether or not I can finish them, leaving multiple projects discontinued sooner or later lol) is definitely the White Room Syndrome. I probably use too many commas too since my mother language is one that's rather comma-heavy compared to English (or at least I think that's the case).

I like setting the the scene and mood, but I dislike writing conversations >⁠.⁠< Also I feel like I ramble a lot when writing!

I throw random funny stuff in even serious scenes that I tell myself I'll change during editing and then I just don't change it

If I could use italics everywhere, I would

an embarrassing amount of my sentences go “something something happened, something else happening as this did that.” also i suck at writing introspection bc i only do it half the time. i keep flip flopping between just describing a character’s actions and delving deep into their emotions and of course, the eternal struggle, never finishing projects :’D

My excessive use of "..." should probably land me in a jail somewhere, but they ain't caught me yet!

- I’ve gotten into a “suddenly” habit every time I try to write lol - I could spend hours just describing the scene bc not all the time can I accurately put down what I see in my head. - Possibly my worst one yet, forgetting to spend time to describe anything at all bc most of the time the action is fast-paced

I’m impatient and the stuff I write is short with not a lot fleshed out.

I physically can’t break up my plots into manageable chunks

I don’t indent my paragraphs. It infuriates me, but I have a genuine excuse for it. I used to write in Google Docs. Docs, when you indent your first paragraph-at least on mobile-will automatically indent every subsequent paragraph. I don’t know if other word processors do this because, duh, I can’t see it, and the indent is never read by my screen reader. Therefore, all of my paragraphs are left looking pretty nasty

My characters *chuckle*. So much chuckling. It’s supposed to be charming but I worry about overusing the word and annoying the reader. I wonder if anyone else notices. 😅

i humanize the characters i write fanfiction about way too much. little personal behaviors, callbacks to specific events in their lives, that kinda thing i worried abt it before because i didnt wanna scare off readers by inserting too many headcanons but at some point i decided. screw this im doing it anyway and my writing style is like a diet coke s.e. lynes. does that count third person present tense

Always starting with the main character waking up 😔 I try to avoid it but I struggle to think of how else to start it

I really, really like Adverbs, to the point where I joke that my Author name is going to be L.Y. Lover, since I like words that end in "ly" so much.

I hoard WIPS. My google drive and my scrivener both are stuffed full of unfinished projects, vague ideas, and pieces of scenes for things I'll never finish. I'm stuffing unfinished drafts and loose papers under the floorboards, where their still beating hearts drive me mad.

using measurements in inconsistent formats (feet sometimes, meters other times) like "he fires a 3 inch wide orange beam that creates a 10 meter radius fireball" like its the description of a dnd spell or a video game wiki entry or something

I either stick with the setting and action but forget the dialogue, or nothing but dialogue while occasionally (often) forgetting the character tags and hoping that the readers magically know who's talking when. Also, imagining future plot points yet forget that I need to write to get there.

LOVE THESE TYPES OF VIDEOS KEEP GOING

EVERYONE. ALWAYS. SIGHS. i can add other descriptions of body language if i consciously think about it, but the only one that comes naturally to me is them sighing. sad? sigh. relieved? sigh. i just need to fill awkward silence? s i g h.

way too much chuckling, gazing, and sighing

When writing I feel like my characters act different then how they acted previously.

That last response calling me out... i watch these to see what things i need to improve on, because theres only so much google can do for me.

I've noticed this in my writing, and I don't know if it's a writing "sin" per say, or if I'm just really good at foreshadowing, but I sometimes mention a thing wayyy too much. Things like, "I have/had a feeling...", "I noticed...", "I remembered..." A lot. I just reeeeaaalllyyy want the reader to get the feeling that this thing is going to be important or that it's something foreshadowing. But, I must remind myself that the readers aren't someone I have to hold a hand through.

Saying characters names soo much. I just keep using them and I can’t stop

I write stories about wars like I’m planning for an actual war. It’s a problem I’ve had since I started writing. Used to let my classmates back in middle school read my work, and the phrase “supply lines” became something of an in-joke. Another in-joke was “War Plan Yellow”, which became shorthand for “the story feels like it’s playing second fiddle to the planning materials”. War Plan Yellow was the war plan used by the antagonists in a fantasy story I wrote, and was part of a huge group of planning materials that included the war plans of numerous factions, maps, logistical planning, propaganda concepts, and the like. I’m certain that the combined length of those materials was far more than the length of the actual story. The main story took place within the span of months, towards the end of the war, but the war spanned nearly a decade. The planning materials spanned the entire length of that war, including the details of failed peace talks that occurred during ceasefires and mock news articles about major events during the course of the war. I may have had a little too much fun making the planning materials.

I like writing too many long Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way-style descriptions.

my writing sin is that I don't have a consistent writing style: sometimes I'll start with the dialogue and fill in the scene later, and other times I'll describe everything that happens with stuff like, "she tells him there's a bee on his drink, he yells that bees are evil," and then I have to go back and turn it into actual dialogue. I also alternate between whimsical descriptions and very to-the-point sentences, which makes my writing seem a bit unbalanced lol

8:26 I am so guilty of this one lmao Also, my sins would be vague descriptions, witty narrating and if I'm writing a fic about a game I like, I'll steal some dialogue from said game, because I am such a stickler when it comes to dialogue. And also I cannot write serious scenes for the life of me, I USED to write some pretty angsty things, but then I toned it down and now I mostly write comedy or something lighter-

im a "too many ellipses" kinda guy. I catch myself with like 3 in a paragraph sometimes

i think mine is personally very weird, but it’s copying whole writing styles. unintentionally of course, but i at times literally find myself imitating the way certain authors write. i feel really guilty about it bc it feels like stealing to me, but i’m trying to fix it

My biggest writing sin is description, there is always too much of it. You don't need to know the shop keeper smells like honey and brown sugar or that she painted over her blue chipped nail polish with pink and you can tell. You will never see this character again but moon Goddess be damned you will know how many individual freckles they have on their uper left thigh.

I use “while, which, as,” wayyyyy too much. And I am a run-on-sentence fiend.

I use the same few words a lot. Like; Said, asked, replied, told, etc. I find myself searching for synonyms of them a lot.

Mine is probably the struggle of getting characters to stop talking. I don't know how to naturally stop conversations irl and I think that's translated into my writing. I don't know if this counts as a sin, but I don't post my writing much because I don't have self-confidence in my work so it usually just sits in my drafts or I anxiously think about it instead of writing

Apparently my brain focuses on different details than it should so my descriptions end up confusing to others. Also commas. Just commas, in general.

My adhd bleeds into my writing a lot, and it especially means that pretty much all the characters I write, no matter _how_ non-adhd they may be in canon, experience my wild train of thought…