History SignatureStyle / Literature

* Creator/ErnestHemingway's stories often feature hunting, fishing, war or bull-fighting. He writes in famously short, direct sentences using simple language so that the style does not distract from the content. Themes of masculinity are prevalent.

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* Creator/RobertAHeinlein: Nearly all of his characters are prodigies or geniuses, and a good number are redheads. Expect his science and math to be detailed and as accurate as humanly possible. His later, more adult works, delved heavily into casual nudity, free-love, and cats.

** A tendency to have fun with characters' emotional and physical relationships that's somewhat unusual for most science fiction authors.

* Creator/PGWodehouse: Light comedy in which [[UpperClassTwit clueless rich people]] and {{Servile Snarker}}s enact {{Zany Scheme}}s.

* Creator/AaronAllston, one of the writers of the ComicBook/XWingSeries, has a very distinct sense of humor which manifests in absurd or mocking bits of dialogue. ''Every'' character with more than a couple lines has some kind of quirk, which at least means that when [[AnyoneCanDie anyone dies]] the reader's response is never "Who?", and his writing is intensely character-driven. He's also got a tendency to put in background female characters who are very muscular.

* Michael A. Stackpole, in and out of the ComicBook/XWingSeries, drops many offhand references about the 'verse he's writing in by TechnoBabble and mentions of unusual cultural quirks held by different species. These tend not to be elaborated on; they're there to [[CrypticBackgroundReference make the 'verse bigger]]. His earlier novels tended to have BeigeProse. There is always one protagonist who is always, ''always'' completely and utterly confident in himself and his ego, even though he also always gets something wrong, experiences failure, and gets humiliated without revenge afterwards. Stackpole's better about this than he used to be, but there are also always a number of RedShirt characters with almost no characterization or dialogue, and all of ''that'' is connected to that confident protagonist. There are characters in the X-Wing Series whose [[RedShirt only lines before being killed]] are about Corran Horn. Also, his characters tend to talk all the same way, with dialogue more suited to exposition.

* Creator/TimothyZahn starts each of his ''[[Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse Star Wars]]'' novels with a description of an Imperial Star Destroyer gliding through space, in reference to the Original Trilogy's opening shots. If he's writing in the prequel era, he substitutes the most appropriate warship of the time. He's got a lot of signature bits in his work.

** He was also a big fan of LoveAtFirstSight, since that was how he fell in love with his wife Edith, who is also directly responsible for the prominence of GrayEyes among his characters.

* Creator/RobertoBolano.
* Creator/WilliamTVollmann

* Robert B. Parker strenuously averts SaidBookism by always describing characters as having "said" something.

* Creator/JKRowling seems to like every trope related to ChekhovsGun. If a character, object, or place is mentioned in passing in an early books, it's almost guaranteed to show up later, usually in a role of vital importance. She also seems to like killing off characters just to show that death is harsh. She also seems fond of semicolons. Creator/StephenKing once commented snarkily that she "never met an adverb she didn't like."

* Creator/VladimirNabokov's stories often feature a male Russian or Eastern-European expatriate protagonist who's an UnreliableNarrator and who is fond of elaborate descriptions and wordplay. Nabokov's unique twist was to have a protagonist who thinks he is TheHero of his own story, but who in fact (on a second or third reading) is at best an AntiHero, and at worst (''Lolita'', ''Pale Fire''), and sometimes unknown to the character himself, a VillainProtagonist. Look for lots of references to butterflies, chess, other works of literature.

* R Scott Bakker of ''Literature/SecondApocalypse'' will always - ''always'' - have characters immediately repeat a word or phrase for emphasis.

* Literature/BrandonSanderson is best known for his [[MagicAIsMagicA intricate, self consistent magic systems.]] His works also tend to contain lots of political intrigue that ultimately [[GambitPileup results in chaos]], {{Well Intentioned Extremist}}s, [[WorldOfSnark large quantities of snark]], and characters [[AscendedToAHigherPlaneOfExistence becoming gods]].

** He likes justifying the natural laws of his worlds as being governed by tropes and cliches, which people can use to their own advantage if they're GenreSavvy enough. The fact that his characters can usually predict what happens later in the story via recognition of tropes and cliches actually makes the stories ''less predictable''.

** He is also well-known for his use of comedic footnotes, even requiring a Footnote character in the play version of some books, and one of his compilation books is titled ''Once More* With Footnotes''. And he seems to love the words 'strata' and 'apologetic'.

* Creator/LarryNiven writes about Giant Space Structures (the ringworld, the smoke ring), sex between different alien species, and really long alien names with lots of [[PunctuationShaker a'postr'oph'es]] in them.

* R. A. Salvatore has described his combat scenes as "Crouching Panther, Hidden Dark Elf". They would not look out of place in {{anime}} or a Hong Kong martial arts flick. Including the over-the-top-ness.

* Creator/DavidFosterWallace: [[SophisticatedAsHell juxtaposition of informal abbreviations and slang with incredibly esoteric words]], words which originally seem incredibly esoteric but end up being made up (usually somehow derived from Latin), the odd continued use of &c. instead of etc. (again with the esoteric Latin thing), compulsive use of footnotes (sometimes useless footnotes, sometimes carrying out entire storylines within footnotes), scenes which are both hilarious and heartbreaking (or disturbing but usually both), obscure connections which are absurd and profound and also pretty funny, &c. And the word "peripatetic," which he seemed to like as much as this wiki likes the word {{egregious}}.

* Stories by ''Franchise/TransformersTimelines'' author team [[PromotedFanboy Greg Sepelak & Trent Troop]] generally involve {{Continuity Nod}}s, {{Mythology Gag}}s, and [[ReferenceOverdosed References]] galore, with the latter always involving at least one TheyMightBeGiants nod.

* Creator/DanBrown, a renowned ConspiracyThriller author, conspicuously and regularly re-uses plot elements and [[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html opening paragraphs]]. As for the actual ''writing style'', Brown is fond of having multiple PlotThreads and shifting between them every 5 to 10 pages (his chapters are really short), usually with a WhatCliffhanger accompanying every shift. It either creates awesome {{thriller}} suspense or gets boring after the third page. He also likes to employ TheManBehindTheMan, sometimes several layers deep. [[spoiler: And the BigBad always turns out to be someone the hero thought he could trust.]]

* L. E. Modesitt, Jr. tells the same story over and over again in most of his books. It's a good story, though, people keep reading them anyway.

* John "A PC" Hodgman writes [[CompleteWorldKnowledge his books]] in a perfectly deadpan, neutral tone, and just happens to drop the occasional incredibly humourous comment into his rhetoric. A LongList is quite likely, too. He also enjoys occasionally breaking into ALL CAPS.

* Creator/DanBrown, a renowned ConspiracyThriller author, conspicuously and regularly re-uses plot elements and [[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html opening paragraphs]]. As for the actual ''writing style'', Brown is fond of having multiple PlotThreads and shifting between them every 5 to 10 pages (his chapters are really short), usually with a WhatCliffhanger accompanying every shift. It either creates awesome {{thriller}} suspense or gets boring after the third page.

* Creator/HPLovecraft writes with SesquipedalianLoquaciousness. Most of his stories are horror stories about eldritch abominations that humanity cannot fathom. Women don't come off very well in his stories, and overtly racist themes against dark-skinned people are common. Cats, however, are always treated with respect. Lovecraft also loved his home town of Providence. His plots often placed TheReveal at the end of the story. Often the climax would be the character discovering The Reveal, and at the end they would recall/ponder it for the reader. Also, his stories are almost always narrated in first person by male characters, and are often precisely dated.

** Another aspect of his ''Franchise/StarTrek'' writing is a very thorough knowledge of the show, with in-jokes, {{Shout Out}}s, and obscure references everywhere. This is epitomized in [[StarTrekNewFrontier Morgan Primus]], who is, effectively, Majel Barrett Roddenberry. Primus has been mistaken for, compared to, or otherwise tied to each of the characters Majel has played in the ''Trek'' universe: Number One in the original pilot, Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi...and so on. She eventually [[spoiler: has her mind downloaded into the ship's computer. It takes a while for the crew to realize it, though, because guess who voices Federation computers on the show?]]

* Creator/KurtVonnegut: lots of free-association and repetition, nonstop [[ShootTheShaggyDog Shooting the Shaggy Dog]], [[SickSadWorld Sick Sad Worlds]] with the bleakness turned up to 11, [[AnachronicOrder nonlinear storytelling]], and the heaviest [[SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped anvils]] he can lift.

* We're sure almost everyone knows by this time that almost all [[Creator/DrSeuss Seuss]] books are written in rhyme.