Verbal Tics

A little over a month ago I was lucky enough to receive a critique on a work in progress from a children's and YA agent. I opted to send in the first chunk of a still-unfinished first draft of a manuscript. I figured if there were any major issues that were already apparent, it might be good to know about them BEFORE I had written another 100+ pages; it's always easier to reshape something that you know is totally unfinished, while typing that last word of that last page has a way of immediately making editing more painful (at least for me).

She offered loads of good suggestions, big and small, including this one: "stop focusing on everyone's eyes so much."

She'd only seen 25 pages, but already people's eyes were large, widening, narrowing, blinking back tears furiously, and generally working to convey about 75% more of the emotional content stuff than they should have been.

This is what all my characters look, and think, and feel like.

Hopefully I would have noticed, and been appropriately terrified by, my weird ocular obsession on my own during a good edit, but more than likely more eyeballs than were strictly necessary would have remained on the page.


If no one had told me "man, you love talking about eyes," I might not have known to...pardon the pun...look out for that little tic in my writing.

I'm not alone in having a few default settings. Just a couple nights ago I texted a friend much better versed than I am in Murakami about Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. She'd previously told me that the book contained a few easter eggs for Murakami diehards--in jokes and deliberate plants that any true aficionado would recognize--so I had to ask:

"Is 'in depressingly realistic detail' one of those in jokes, or is it just a phrase he's using over and over in this book?"

Apparently it was a one-novel tic, but it was regular enough that I bothered to ask after it.

And that's fricking MURAKAMI. We all know I'm no Murakami.

The question, though, is how you catch this in yourself? Extremely distinctive phrases are easy to call out, as is assuming all your characters are essentially Saurons, hovering over each other, occasionally blinking lidlessly. But what about the tiny, everyday tics? The clever way of describing light on water that you use in multiple chapters (or across multiple novels), or the tendency to think of all brunettes as chestnut, or the way you try to physically depict nervous energy?

Presumably the answer is "you get a good editor"; I'd love to know what said good editors have highlighted for other people...