My greatest weakness as a writer

          We’ve all been there, either in the room with an interviewer or filling out a job application form, when the interviewer asks: what is your greatest weakness?

It’s tempting to try to make it a positive thing (My greatest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist), or avoid answering it (I can’t think of any weakness). Sometimes we are too honest (I have trouble waking up every morning to go to work). Most of us probably have a ready answer for the question in a job interview but today I want to talk about my greatest weakness as a writer.

I was homeschooled for most of my primary and secondary education. I started with an American curriculum in primary school and continued with it through High School. Around grade 6, I started doing national French curriculum (Centre Nationale d’Enseignement à Distance or CNED) at the same time to keep my French up. The American curriculum was easy enough. Most of the test questions were multiple word choice questions or “fill in the blanks” questions. This didn’t prepare me at all for when I started the French curriculum. They actually wanted me to write essays and page long answers. For the CNED, the student would take the tests which would then get sent to the correctors back in France. The correctors would mark the tests and send it back. I usually managed to pass, if not with decent enough scores, but the mark I came to dread from the correctors was a single word written with a red pen either in the margin or at the bottom of a paragraph: Redigez.

Once I finished High School, I forgot all about that word until I started university in France. In my first year of general law studies, the dreaded “redigez” started to appear again on my assigned papers. I made a greater effort and it stopped appearing by the time it got to the second year.

The word “redigez” or “rediger,” in its non conjugated form, means to write but in the context my teachers were using it, it meant that I was not writing out enough explanations for my answers. Basically I was contenting myself with just writing down the basic answer instead of writing out an explanation of how I had arrived at that answer. My answers would be understandable by someone who knew the material but anyone else reading it would have a hard time understanding the logic I had used to arrive at the answer. It’s kind of like in math when you just give the answer to the math problem without showing your work.

I feel I still have this problem when I write. I’ll be reading a novel and I’ll compare it to my work and I’ll think “wow they have all this detail and extra things in their writing while mine seems bare in comparison.” Of course you can’t always compare one scene to another scene so it’s hard to tell. My solution to this will be to get feedback on it from my alpha readers （you know who you are）on whether difference scenes seem to fit or not and carefully check while doing the second draft to see if anything needs to be added to give the reader enough detail to spark their own imagination when reading my story. In my opinion, as long as the reader can see what I want him to see in his/her/zir own mind, that’s really all the words the scene needs.

And you never know, some readers might appreciate a little brevity in their reading material. I think most people will agree with me when I say that many fantasy novels and sci-fi novels could use some extra editing. Take for example Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Fifteen books at a minimum of 700 pages a book. The first novel in the series was great. The rest, could have used a lot more editing. Don’t get me wrong, I think WOT is a great series but it could have been better, not to mention completed before the author died, if an editor had played a little more active role and asked RJ: Is going into the ten thousand year history of clothmaking in your fantasy world really necessary to advance the plot?

I have two pet peeves at the moment when reading novels. The first is reading a novel that in the end is full of nothing. I will give you an example. S. M. Stirling wrote a twelve book series that is kind of post apocalyptic/fantasy. The first book was quite good with a lot happening. The next couple of books were still on point, sort of, but once he got out of the starting trilogy they meandered for a bit, but he finally got to the end of the story nine books later.

He has now started a new series in the same universe that takes place in the same universe (known as the Emberverse). The first book in the new series is called “The Golden Princess.” It is twenty-one chapters long with an epilogue but the sad fact is nothing happens in the book. The plot of the novel can be summed up in this line: They decide to go on a journey and start to prepare for it. They don’t actually go on the journey itself, they almost do. Literally nothing happens in this book. As a new writer who’s spending time a lot of time trying to think of how to keep a novel interesting and moving along it feels like cheating when a published author has book with a chapter containing two characters we don’t even know having a conversation about random things that have nothing to do with the storyline.

My other biggest pet peeve is David Weber’s annoying trait of writing side novels for his main Honorverse series, then taking entire chapters from one book and inserting it into the next book he writes or inserting entire chapters from one of his main books into a side novel. I don’t mean he summarizes the previously written chapters or writes them in a new way from a different character’s point of view. He literally just copies and pastes the whole chapter from one book to the other. He’s even done this for several chapters in a book at a time so you end up only reading 75 % of actual new content.

But that’s enough about what I think. What annoyed you the most in a book you’ve recently read? Or what is something authors do that gets you angry when you read it?