25 Days of Writing: Day 19 - Things You Repeat
19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe 'too often', trope you can’t get enough of?)
I think the phrase "sheer force of will" has turned up in at least three of the four novels I've finished. And likely will again.
Seriously, though, I'm not one of those writers who gets bent about frequently-used words; to be honest, I tend to look a bit askance at the whole issue. Certainly there are words I use a lot; "just", for example, gets a fairly big typeface in a wordle. But it's a very useful word, and I'm not going to go hunting it down with extreme prejudice just because (see what I mean?) some people have taken an entirely arbitrary and unjustified dislike to it.
On a more meta level, loyalty, and its mirror image betrayal, are themes that turn up frequently in my work. This is fine by me; there's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of that concept, and you can do all sorts of fun character things with it. You can tell a lot about a character (or a person) by what they won't compromise, who is automatically a priority when there's no way to satisfy everything, what they expect from others and themself when things get tight.
And of course, taking the thing they would give their life and their soul for and having it turn on them is a great way to screw up their world. /*insert evil writer cackle*/
This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/234961.html because I got tired of dealing with whatever LiveJournal had broken this time. Comment whereever.
I think the phrase "sheer force of will" has turned up in at least three of the four novels I've finished. And likely will again.
Seriously, though, I'm not one of those writers who gets bent about frequently-used words; to be honest, I tend to look a bit askance at the whole issue. Certainly there are words I use a lot; "just", for example, gets a fairly big typeface in a wordle. But it's a very useful word, and I'm not going to go hunting it down with extreme prejudice just because (see what I mean?) some people have taken an entirely arbitrary and unjustified dislike to it.
On a more meta level, loyalty, and its mirror image betrayal, are themes that turn up frequently in my work. This is fine by me; there's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of that concept, and you can do all sorts of fun character things with it. You can tell a lot about a character (or a person) by what they won't compromise, who is automatically a priority when there's no way to satisfy everything, what they expect from others and themself when things get tight.
And of course, taking the thing they would give their life and their soul for and having it turn on them is a great way to screw up their world. /*insert evil writer cackle*/
This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/234961.html because I got tired of dealing with whatever LiveJournal had broken this time. Comment whereever.