Writers and Their Tics

book inc writers Liz Jannuzzi and Jen Gaites trade craft advice on character repetition, showing how a recurring gesture only works when it reveals something true about a character.

My writer friend Jennifer Gaites and I were texting about a memoir we were reading for book club—one we didn’t love.

“And like, can she stop sniffing coffee?” Jen texted.

I reacted with a laughing emoji, but in the spirit of solidarity, I offered some grace: “I repeat things in my memoir too. (Sober Mom, out July 21.) I’m constantly pouring a cup of coffee and gazing out the window.” Writers and coffee—it’s a thing.

Jen responded: “We all do it. In my novel, my protagonist is constantly taking deep breaths.”

Her comment sent me back to my reading past. Like most writers, I was a voracious reader as a kid. Between my early Hobbit days and my later Clan of the Cave Bear phase, I was a Danielle Steel fanatic. I was way too young for those books, but what can I say? I’m a Gen Xer—we weren’t closely supervised.

I learned a lot from Steel (one might say too much!), including the fact that if a woman were pregnant, she would faint. Because that’s how Steel signaled a character’s pregnancy.

Every. Single. Time.

And then the father-to-be (not always the husband!) would gift her a tennis bracelet. Steel led me to believe there would be a lot more tennis bracelets in my future.

Back in our text thread, Jen and I started to realize that repetition isn’t always a flaw. Sometimes it’s a feature.

“Did you ever read The Mysterious Benedict Society with your kids?” she asked. “One of the characters constantly cleans his glasses when he’s nervous.”

I hadn’t read those, but I knew exactly what she meant: “That’s like Elizabeth in Lessons in Chemistry.” In that novel, the main character always tucks a sharp pencil in her hair when she gets serious about her work. And later in the book, that same pencil becomes something the character uses to defend herself. The author turned a character tic into a plot device.

As we texted back and forth, we landed on a mini craft lesson:

Repetition is fine—if it’s intentional. If it reveals character. Cleaning your glasses when you’re anxious. Tucking a pencil in your bun before you get to work. But repetition that serves no purpose? That should be tweaked.

I do drink a lot of coffee, so those scenes in my memoir aren’t inaccurate. But I didn’t need to reach for the same gesture over and over. In hindsight, I could have varied it—wiping down the counter, sweeping the floor, folding laundry—different actions that still carry the same reflective quality without becoming a tic the reader notices.

The goal is for your character’s habits to feel lived-in, not worn out. With that, Jen and I came up with three craft tips regarding character repetition.

1. Ask what the gesture is doing. Every repeated action should earn its place. Is it revealing personality? Signaling an emotion, habit, or desire? If you can’t answer what the repetition does for the reader’s understanding of the character, it may just be an authorial habit—something you reach for when you don’t know where else to put your character’s hands.

2. Vary the container; keep the meaning. If your character always needs something to do with her hands, she doesn’t always have to reach for coffee. The underlying impulse—restlessness, comfort-seeking, the need to stay busy—can manifest in different gestures. Varying the action keeps the scene fresh while preserving the character truth underneath.

3. Read your manuscript with a highlighter. Go through a draft and mark every time a character makes the same gesture or reaches for the same object. Seeing them clustered on the page is clarifying. Some will feel earned; others will reveal themselves as defaults. That’s your revision roadmap.

The best character tics are the ones readers don’t consciously notice—until they do, and by then they’ve already fallen a little in love. The glasses-cleaning, the pencil in the bun, the deep breath before the hard conversation. These are the gestures that make a character feel like someone you know.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to pour myself a cup of coffee and gaze out the window.

About the Writers

Jennifer Gallo Gaites is a writing instructor at Project Write Now, a nonprofit writing organization. She’s working on a novel and writes essays about identity and motherhood, with work published in Riverteeth's “Beautiful Things,” WOW Women on Writing, Hippocampus, and Literary Mama. Her Substack, Mast Years, explores the shifting terrain of raising kids through changing seasons of life.

Elizabeth Jannuzzi is the author of Sober Mom: A Memoir (July 2026). Her work explores themes of loss, motherhood, and recovery from alcoholism, and has appeared in HuffPost, Under the Gum Tree, The Rumpus, Memoir Monday, WOW! Women On Writing, The Brevity Blog, and more. Elizabeth earned a Best of the Net nomination in 2023. She is the program director at Project Write Now, a nonprofit writing organization. She resides in New Jersey and engages with her audience through a weekly Substack newsletter.

About book inc

book inc is a writing collective dedicated to helping writers draft, revise, and publish memoirs and novels. Our book incubators and revision workshops help writers realize their artistic and commercial potential.