Style Bad Writing Habits

Judiging by the bad habits I've read here, I don't actually do anything right.

Still the worst one I have is, as far as I'm concerned, starting every chapter with the name of a character. And I can't stop myself from doing it, nor manage to find an acceptable alternative after I did it and see it.

Kayleigh woke up to the sunlight flooding her room.
Okay. Let's change it up this time.
The sunlight flooding her room woke Kayleigh up.
Bitch is still in the first sentence, what's the point?
She woke up to the sunlight flooding her room.
Who? Which room am I in?

See? Ain't no winning this one.

 

The first step is to admit you have a problem. Welcome to Bad Writers Anonymous, we hope you keep showing up to the meetings!

 

It's going to be a long, hard road.

 

See this image? This is someone testing differing tones of taupe and beige and the greys in between the two. I do this a lot in my writing, but with words, obviously, trying out different ways to say the thing. But then I fail to go back and pick a color. I leave a few of them, like on this wall with the same end effect.

 

You're a Modern Arteest, man!!

 

I am the Comma King!

 

Starting shit I never finish.

 

If that were true, your post would read, "Starting shit I never . . . "

 

Your room looks like my office. As a photographer, I want an environment where I can digitally process my photos with no environmental skewing of the color of ambient light. I am amazed at the amount of gray paint in our world, and how many aren't really GRAY. gray.

 

I've developed a horrible passive voice habit. It's annoying.

 

You can totally do that third one, assuming you don't have ten different POVs.

My bad habit is over-explaining. I hate it when authors I'm reading leave me confused about where the characters are and what's going on. So darn it, I'm not gonna be like them. I'm gonna make sure my readers know. Whether they need to or not.

 

I do the same thing. It's frustrating because a lot of the time I don't realize I'm doing this and they can be hard to catch. Let me know if you figure out a way to break this bad habit.

 

My worst habit is over-writing things. I'll write a sentence and then say the same thing in different ways three or four times immediately following it. I'm not sure why I do this, but I do it often. Grrrr...

 

Why not use ALL CAPS methadone; italics?

 

Like when you put product in your hair and it straightaway looks okay so you fiddle with it a bit more and everything you do gets you further away from your desired place, like one of those dreams when you are going on holiday but can't get anywhere

 

Acceptable but does not make you want to read it surely?

 

It's actually quite standard in the industry. I haven't intended a paragraph in decades. Not a bad habit or turn off as far as I'm concerned.

 

AKA, "A horrible passive voice habit has developed in my writing. It is found to be annoying by myself and many others."

 

I have a really really bad habit of trying to edit as I go rather than just throw down the story and then edit later. I tried to write a chapter and then edit the chapter before moving onto the next chapter. I ended up driving myself nuts so now I just flow and glow in my own madness until its time to edit.

 

Hitting backspace instead of just adding in the one letter that was missing.

 

Double caps in a word with two letters so it looks intentional but is tonally preposterous: "HE was waiting in Chichester"

 

I was in the habit of using 'was' and 'then' too much, but then I was enlightened. Or was I?

 

Using the same verbs all the time to describe the expressions my characters make. They tend to constantly frown, chuckle, sigh, cock their heads and raise their eyebrows.

 

Try having them cock their eyebrows. That way, they can go 'off' with a hair-trigger.

 

Commas, definitely commas!
I find it really hard not to overuse them because they fit so well into the narration that I do in my head while reading back over my writing.