There was a regency romance author that I enjoyed reading until I realized she had the same same anecdote word for word in nearly every book she wrote. It was about a person named Tom Collins inventing the first mixed drink. (Looking at wiki now, that happened well before the regency period, too)
Nothing relevant to the story, just here’s some trivia I like.
No, I just remembered it wrong. It is a term that I have probably never seen outside of his books.
Ann Rule liked the words “ebullient” and “pellucid.”
Her daughter wrote a very good true crime book a few years ago, and while she copied her mother’s writing style quite well, the book did not contain either word. Yeah, I BOLO’ed for them.
Just did a word search and “by-blow” is used 29 times in his books.
Actually just once or twice in every book. But once I noticed it (I tend to notice “myriad” because I prefer “myriad” to “a myriad of”), it came up in EVERY book. And I probably read 10 of his novels. Seemed an odd practice. I wonder if he - or his editor - is aware of it.
Nice phrase! I know King has used that one more than once.
Too many of his books have extended chase scenes.
“Chiaroscuro” sent me to the dictionary. Sometimes it seemed like he was writing as if to say hey, look how big my vocabulary is, but I have been accused of that as well. The boss chewed me out once for using “exacerbated” in a production report – it just seemed like the right word to use, and it never occurred to me that it would be too obscure.
I was reading Shackleton’s South, developing a keen grasp of all the different ways to describe ice, and it was a particularly clean and easy read until I was halfway across Antarctica, where lay “sastrugi” and “finneskoe”, words that I was entirely unequipped to suss from context.
Well, Shaun is no help:
Koontz had lots of literary tics. One book I recall he was really infatuated with the word preternatural and its variants, using it more than several times.
I opened this thread to mention his use of “limned”.
SO many times a character was limned with a verdant eldritch corona.
.
I keep thinking “Hey, aren’t there grammar checkers that could flag an author’s tenth use of the same adjective or phrase?”
.
THIS!
We should have a “When does your guilty pleasure let you down?” thread.
I just downloaded a Reacher book and he’s getting grilled by a local sheriff, and later by the standard Mysterious Tough-But-Broken Woman. And after each question, or just an ordinary sentence, I had to listen to “Reacher said nothing.” Maybe forty times…
And it was an audiobook, so I couldn’t just skim past that phrase; I had to listen to it. Each.Time.
Until Reacher’s nothing was really something.
Crepuscular always reminds me of an Italian edition of Wagner I encountered that included the title, Il crepusculo degli dei.
I think of Thelonius Monk’s “Crepuscle With Nellie”.
And “roynish.” 
Not a grammar checker, but the simple find command in Word.
Whenever I feel like I’ve used a word too often I search for it. If it’s overused I rewrite.
Most words can be reused, of course. Most words are invisible. How many times has the word “word” been used in this thread? Yet good writers develop a feel for word use and learn to distinguish between invisible words and those that protrude sufficiently to trip up a reader. Sometimes even good writers get it wrong, as seen above. Caveat: Note that almost everybody mentioned is merely a popular writer, not a literary giant.
Literary giants have to be above hackwork; it’s part of the contract. Oscar Wilde once put down a boor who thought he didn’t work hard by saying “This morning, I took out a comma, and this afternoon—I put it in again.”
And before you check me on that, he said something similar that’s gotten simplified over the years. All hail the Quote Investigator.
Originally posted by E.B. White
“Pop,” said Sam, “What does ‘crepuscular’ mean?..It says here that a rabbit is a crepuscular animal.”
“Probably means timid,” said Mr. Beaver. “Or maybe it means that it can run like the dickens. Or maybe it means stupid. A rabbit will sit right in the middle of the road at night and stare into your headlights and never get out of the way, and that’s how a lot of rabbits get run over. They’re stupid.”
Or they’re blinded by those headlights, genius.
Apparently E.L. James (50 Shades series and other bad romance fiction) really loves the word “murmured,” to the point that people who read it to riff on it wind up thinking of her every time they see that word in other works.
There’s also, whenever a woman served a man a cup of coffee, she’d apologize that she could only offer honey to sweeten it. If he was a protagonist, he’d always respond that he preferred his coffee with honey.
I haven’t read any Louis L’Amour villains who preferred honey in their coffee (otoh, I can’t remember a lady character in a LL book offering coffee to a villain).
Jim Theis could have profited from that advice, although I venture to speculate that doing so would have made The Eye of Argon a teensy bit less entertaining.
Re 50 shades, there’s this:
https://me.me/i/semicoloncommaperiod-so-tried-to-read-50-shades-of-grey-this-10282035
He turned me off from the words “chthonic” and “preternatural” for life (not that I was particularly likely to use or encounter either one often enough to make a difference).