The key to being a really good writer is recognizing what you are good at and learning to make it central to your work but not lean on it. However, the teeth of that key is realizing what you aren’t so good at and especially what it is that you do lean on in your writing. I explored this a little in this blog when I talked about my reliance on all forms of the word some. I use somewhere and someone and somehow almost every blog. It is not the only crutch I stand on.
I am a fan of the compound sentence. Often you may find that I have sentenced fused together with the mighty ‘and’ and (ha!) I find that it helps to push descriptions together in a way that dictates flow or at least resembles speed. This crutch is one I was introduced to by a friend and editor who eviscerated me on a doc a dozen years ago. She was acting editor for a line of projects and (see….) she saw this tendency in my writing. All it took was one highlighted document looking Christmas for me to realize the problem. Nowadays I work all of that out in editing. Still, in freewriting the tendency rises to the surface.
I do love a good description of the eye. Specifically, I rely heavily on what people see in the first draft. I also rely on using their eyes as a reaction response. January raised her eyebrows slowly, realizing what the Talislegger had been doing all along… This is one I caught myself. In my last novella draft I almost exclusively focused on eye reactions… for 15000 words. Seriously, there were hardly any other types of reactions in the draft. I may have offered a clenched fist here and there, but the eyes spoke volumes. Well, that entire volume at least. Good descriptions operate throughout the body. You ought to be thinking about what the POV character is watching. Not everyone is focused on the eyes. A tapping foot can do wonders for shifting perception.
Those are just a few of my crutches. I implore you to think through what I wrote and find your own crutches. If you want to be a better writer you need to stop leaning on what you’re good at and get better at everything else.