Stylistic tics

In the best writing, the author disappears. Not everyone would agree with this. The success and critical acclaim of authors like M. John Harrison, China Mieville, and Neil Gaiman would seem to argue otherwise. I appreciate what these authors achieve with their pyrotechnics, and I enjoy them (especially Gaiman) if I'm in the mood, but this is not the kind of writer I want to be. I want my readers to forget I exist. Martin Cruz Smith is my role model, along with a slew of hardboiled novelists who put the story first and themselves last. I'm thinking about James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss), Jim Thompson, Harry Crews (A Feast of Snakes). Yeah, I could go on. Invisible writing requires a vicious internal editor to seek out and eradicate all stylistic tics. You know about tics, right?

They'll suck the blood out of your writing so fast it'll make your head swoon. And then where will you be? As I trudge through this monstrous manuscript, I'm learning to find and destroy my worst tics:

• Anemic sentences, thanks to dependence on 'was', 'was (verb)ing', and other abuses of the verb to be.
• Overuse of em dashes, semicolons, and ellipses.
• Poorly handled speaker attributions. I'm a saidist (my characters will occasionally shout, murmur, or whisper, but they usually just say things, and never ever ever do they aver, proclaim, hiss, or growl their sentences). Nevertheless, my attributions often suck.

Those are my primary tics. Have you found yours yet? D.