Things You’ve Noticed In Your Writing

Most of my mains are dudes. Oh well.
I tend to use names that aren't very common. Fletcher and Chester are the mains of Cold Void and Avi and Rondy are the mains of another story.
I overly describe the scene in the first half of chapter one and then drop that in favor of the character's actions. My characters seem to enjoy leaving right as I get to them.

In Bus, Doug's uncle Paul is almost never referred to just as "Uncle Paul." Doug always calls him his "weird Uncle Paul."

And Andy from Generation Why Bother likes hugs.

I like to write about forests. Magic ones. With lots of evils inside them.
I have a tendency towards Germanic surnames and English callnames.
When I write about the future it tends to be a highly political, law-driven land with mechanised everything and few jobs for humans.
My robots are extremely too human.
I can't write females very well.

I have a faze of names that I really like. For example Riley. I used to like it. Now, not so much.
I also have a lot of trouble deciding on names for characters and put placeholders on if I need to (eg [name], yellow highlighted on Word). Or if I have multiple characters I number off my placeholders (like [name_2]).

I avoid using 'said' because I don't like it
I really like writing dialogue.
I don't use names for characters that I know in real life. Eg, my best friend's name is Steph so I'm less inclined to have a 'Steph' in any of my stories.

I use too many commas
I like names that aren't very popular and/or old-fashioned
I like paragraphs and one-liners
Most of my main characters have a dramatic past
I use way too many dashes for it to be legal

Like a whole lot of other people, I use a lot of commas too!
I use adverbs a shit load. I'm trying to stop that.
My main characters always have brown hair, and their best friends have a lighter color. Yikes.

My sentences are so long!

I have tense issues so bad.
Most of my OC's have green eyes...? I didn't even realise I had a think for green eyes. (while looking back ay my old posts, holy shit, I've always had a thing for green eyes what is this?????)
I can't write hetero sex very well.
I can't write fluff well.
I suck at writing through the POV of girls, yet I am a girl...?
Repetition is my main skill.
I either write too much dialogue or not enough, there's never an inbetween.
I'm pretty sure I've thrown in an "of course" into every thing I've ever written
I like to throw in really obscure and random symbols and just bring them up in every single chapter, as if my character didn't notice the first 5 chapters.
I've never written romantic sex, it's only ever like, low key porno
When it comes to drabbles, I generally base it around my life and how I'm feeling.

oh gawd. There's so many things... First off, I always seem to repeat a lot of things. I can't help it nor have I figured out how to fix this. I also can't have my punctation lining up with others. Like, if I find a period lining up with a comma or another period in a previous paragraph/sentence, I have to figure out how to make it NOT line up either. I don't know why those bothers me, but it's something I've been trying to work on. By doing that, I'll just leave the sentences as is and move on, especially if I can't think of a way to make it longer or rephrase it. It's helped me some, but not a lot.

I'm a self-educated writer, so I rely mostly on research about writing, grammar and all that. I can usually only learn seldom from others, but I learn mostly on my own instead. I've actually changed how I write by trying to read more books, which isn't easy if you have poor reading comprehension and a slow learning disability either. :x I do my best, yet I know that there are times when just that isn't good enough. D:

I also notice that I write more about explaining things than I write dialogue. It does depend on the story and what I'm actually writing though. I have times when I do the opposite of those things and drag the story on. Believe me, I'm very well aware of the flaws I have when writing. XD I could go on forever with this too.

Another thing is that almost all of my characters are either autistic or just socially-awkward or something.

99% of the time my stories are either romance, fantasy, or both, the main characters are always boys and always gay and always fall in love. I pick out names that are unique and aren't heard around very often, and if they are, they're spelled differently. I always need a picture of what I want the character to look like before I start writing about them, sometimes I'll see a picture of a random person and get an idea from that. I tend to stray from fanfiction because I like creating my own characters and I don't want my characters to be limited by the personality that person would have to portray.

I've noticed I either have a big block of dialogue or a big block of description. I'm really bad at intergrating them both together.

I'm really bad at switching tenses, not having enough description or having too much, and not expressing emotion correctly.

I think the biggest thing I've noticed in my writing is that I tend to be lazy. I take on something that I didn't have the best interest in and after a couple chapters I skip on pretty much everything. I also noticed I get extremely lazy in the detail department when I'm writing. I will put very vague details in and won't elaborate to make them form pictures in your head.

I often forget to physically describe things, including characters and settings. (Especially settings! Where are the characters having their conversation?? Presumably in a blank void. lol)

Also, in terms of subject matter and rating and the like, I've noticed an amusing tendency of either writing something perfectly "G" rated with no swearing or violence or anything OR the story is at least an "R" and is full of bad language, violence, etc. I'm not saying I have no inbetweens, but it's a bit more rare for me, I think. (Especially when I post to places with more lax rating rules!)

- Most of my characters smoke, or have smoked at some point in their lifetime
- I very rarely write characters over the age of 25
- Characters in my stories swear almost as much as I do in real life
- Most of my characters have a job that is either military or police related
- I'd probably say that most, if not all, of my characters are of a white, European background. Oops.

Even though a character's gender doesn't matter to me at all, I find I mostly write about men.

I recently noticed I write about characters getting sick a lot. I swear that's a coincidence and not some kind of sign I'm into anything weird and puke related. I just apparently put characters in situations where they get sick a lot.

I write about religious and/or spiritual themes a lot. I did this even when I was an agnostic. (I just really like exploring these themes in writing!)

I tend to write about established couples or write stories without any couples way more often that I write stories about characters getting together. Romance is almost always secondary to the main plot, and often there is no romance plot at all. (I just don't tend to like writing about developing relationships. I much prefer to tell other stories and/or to develop relationships that are already established. Maybe that's just more relatable and easier for me to write since I've been married for like 5 years??)

If not all, but the majority of my stories have at least one sarcastic character

I've just noticed, in both my stories, the main character is a married man in his thirties struggling to some degree with their own insecurities—one in a more vain capacity, and the other in a more general perception of his self-worth stemming from the 'perfection' of his wife and his sterility.

I write about characters' dreams a lot. Like, in a lot of stories and series there will be at least one scene that is a dream or related to a dream.

I also write flashbacks and memory related introspective type stuff a lot, too.