Zodiac Clichés (And Other Nonsense)

Trying Too Hard

#10: authors try too hard to make their writing sound "smart."

I know I might be nitpicking here, but I feel like I see this one everywhere. It's just this dumbass thing where the writer of the story will describe all of the character appearances in one chapter, and in the next chapter, they use that description as if we don't know who the character they're talking about is.

Example

Title: Zodiac High School! 😎🤓☺️

Character introductions:

Gemini
Female
Short, has green eyes, has long blonde hair, likes to wear makeup.

Chapter 1: New Day, New School

The big yellow bus pulled up at the school's entrance. A short blonde girl with green eyes and lots of makeup got off the bus and walked up to the school.

My first day, she thought. This is going to be a train wreck.

The short blonde girl walked into her first class of the day: English. When she walked in, the teacher said, "Class, this is our new student, Gemini! She moved here all the way from New York."

*End of Example

It's like, why can't you just say their name? We literally just read the character description and now the author is trying to be all mysterious by not mentioning their name. It just comes off as dumb, and I've seen this in more books than I'd like to.

The Solution: you could go about this one of two ways:
1: remove the introductory character description chapter entirely, and keep the writing the same (my preferred method).
2: just say the character's name instead.

I don't know if this bugs anyone as much as it bugs me (it probably doesn't), but it's just unnecessary to describe a character's appearance after we already know what they look like.

5/10/20