7 Bad Habits of Highly Ineffective Writers
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All my life I’ve been told, “Write what you know.” It started in the first grade when Mrs. Osborne said, “Write what you know.”
“But I don’t know how to write,” I whined. It was my first day of school.
The ancient crone — probably in her mid-forties — waved me off. “You’ll figure it out, eventually. Now sit up straight and stop picking your nose.”
That’s when it began. And, although somewhat prophetic, her platitude wasn’t quite accurate. It has been six decades plus since that enlightening moment, yet I’m still trying to figure it out, this writing thing. And what I know and don’t know.
However, I have picked up a few bad habits over the years, and some of them apply to my meandering trek on the keyboard. I’m sure there are more than seven if I thought about it, but that would alter my title which is a play on a really famous book upon which I hope to capitalize. I discount those twelve Big Chief Tablet* and Spiral Notebook years where my hand-written stuff was more an exercise in penmanship* or required word counts than meaningful prose.
*For Millennials & Gen Z’s:
Big Chief tablets were the principle writing platforms used in schools before the 21st Century. Unlike today’s tablets, they were not electronic, but made of sheets consisting of 90% wood chips and 10% paper. You would write on the surface of the sheets using a hand-held wooden instrument with a graphite core. See Wikipedia; Ebay.
Penmanship refers to the skill of handwriting, usually in cursive (written with the characters joined).
I’m thinking this platform would be as good a place as any — better than most — to increase my word count by laying out a list of those bad habits. Lists are popular reading and make for easy click-bait headlines. You with me so far? Good, keep reading.
Habit 1 — Be Procrastinative
This is the easiest habit for a writer to develop. It takes hardly any skill and little talent. I started out as a crastinator, but eventually turned pro [rim shot]. Here’re some examples of how you can, too.
Let’s say you’ve got a great idea for a novel/blog/article/recipe/hate mail. You sit down and write the first 100, maybe 200 words until you get stuck on a salient point/character/ingredient/obscenity. At this point, I highly recommend the procrastinator technique of immediately going to Facebook to check your posts and likes (my SM of choice). After spending several useless minutes there, you can switch to other social media platforms, if you use them. With little or no practice, you’ll find many, many hours can be wasted there to avoid writing.

Technique 2: Check your email. Usually, there are scads of spam to delete. Sometimes I even read a few of them to kill a few more minutes.
Technique 3: Snack Food. You start thinking about snacks and that’ll get you up and away from the keyboard. My weakness is dark chocolate M & M’s, but I don’t limit myself to those and you shouldn’t either. Oreos or a peanut butter sandwich are good. Mmm, Little Debbie’s. Sometimes I even go out to get my snacks. I would avoid Wendy’s, though, as they advertise that “Our secret ingredient is our people. Now hiring.” You can fact check me on this.
There’re myriad ways to procrastinate, so be creative. Afterall, you’re a writer.
Habit 2 — Start a writing project without knowing how it will end.
This one is fairly easy, too. Those of us who practice it are called “Pantsers” in the trade, as in, write by the seat of your pants. I’ve found the best way to develop this habit is to never, ever outline. Outlining will invariably make your brain hurt, and who wants that. Sometimes even dark chocolate M&M’s won’t cure it. Your time could be better wasted checking your social media.
Habit 3 — Put first what you’ll later discover is the middle.

And the middle is actually the beginning. I can count on both hands and feet the number of times I’ve had to do this massive cut and paste. This goes back to the not outlining thing. It makes me so angry. It’s like a bronze statue upon which I’ve put the head of Andrew Jackson on the butt of his horse. It’s a big cut and weld. Like the malignantly ignorant monument vandals across America, you’ll find it to be a huge waste of time and maybe even felonious.
Habit 4 — Think Purple
Sometimes I get caught up in my own verbosity, thinking I’m part of the literati. That only seems to happen after I’ve read some 19th Century literature or Stephen King, which is rare nowadays. A late professor and author, Stephen H. Webb (never heard of him, but he was kind of a big deal at Wabash College in Indiana) once wrote of purple prose,
“It is both imperial and regal, demanding attention, and overly ornate, ostentatious, even marked by profanity.”
I’d say to Professor Webb, “Damn straight.” I’ve done all of that except the profanity part. I try not to write profanity, even though it’s currently fashionable by the unimaginative. (No ****ing hate mail, please.)
Habit 5 — Seek to understand punctuation, then overuse it.
Sometimes I wish I wrote in old Hebrew because old written Hebrew has no punctuation marks. That’s what I’m told. They also write from right to left. Well, they read from right to left, so I just assume… but if they actually write from left to right, that would be a neat trick, writing backwards. Right? Proves God has a sense of humor. I can see Moses starting to jot down the Ten Commandments and God goes, “Ech, Ech. Right to left, right to left. No commas, no periods.”
Maybe some Hebrew scholars can address that, but right now we’re discussing punctuation in English. I pretty much know what a period is for and when to use it. Also, exclamation and quotation marks. Colons are clean [rim shot]. Parentheses aside, commas and semi-colons… they confuse me, as do hyphens and dashes. I’m pretty much of the school, When in Doubt, Use One. Commas and semi-colons are cheap. Hyphens I can figure out, usually. But the en and em dashes, I mean, who gives a damn. Most readers can’t tell them apart nor do they care. Editors, on the other hand, being the sadistic OCD lunatics they are, love me for this bad habit. They measure every en and em to the angstrom. They can scour me up one side and down the other to their maniacal hearts’ delight leaving me a bloody gibbering lump. Can’t stop myself, though. Guess I’m masochistic.
Speaking of editors, there is a post I’d like to share with you written by MaryJo Wagner, PhD. She’s — oxymoronically — a reasonable editor. She addresses the barbed wire roll of commas and semi-colons in this piece along with several other dilemmas in writing the English language:
I’m familiar with the Oxford Comma. But I prefer more the Biloxi Community College Comma.
Habit 6 — De-synergize
When you synergize, you join together with others to produce a thing greater than the sum of your separate things. To that I say, pffft. I have a little closet and I’m staying in it. Go ‘way. I’ll come out and synergize when Joe Biden does.
Habit 7 — Use Old Saws
It’s easy to confuse Old Saws with Cliches because there’s no difference. It’s just that one has been around longer. I prefer to call them Old Saws because, 1 — I’m an Old Saw myself, 2 — the word cliche sounds too French, 3 — the word cliche has become a cliche. You can kill two birds in the hand with one stone.
So, there you go. If you want to achieve ineffectiveness in your writing, by all means use these. None of them require discipline or suffering or hardship. To quote Homer Simpson:
“If something is hard, it’s probably not worth doing.”
One last old saw to leave with you: Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.
I could use some more reads (money) for this post:
And this one:
How about I give you something for your trouble.
Honest. Click the image below to go to my website. When you join my readers group, I’ll send you a free copy of my short stories collection, Skins Game. While you’re there, read previews of my novels. Also free. The previews, that is.
