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Signature Style
"Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, and at the word "go" all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word "clench"."
— Nick Lowe, The Well-Tempered Plot Device

Authors have styles. It's common and acceptable that, when people write often, they start to develop a distinct way of writing, or an arbitrary favouritism for one of their characters, places, or even a specific name.

Some authors, though, have internalized a single style to such extent that it's noticeable in anything they happen to write, co-write, or in extreme cases, even inspire. There are extreme cases in which, without knowing who wrote the work you're watching/reading, you can say "Hey, it has to be <insert author name here>!", because his/her style is too distinct and famous not to recognize.

Related to Author Appeal, Author Catchphrase. Compare Hey Its That Guy.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books
  • Chris Claremont could be said to have such characteristics, most notably his famously distinct yet uniform dialogue in which characters, regardless of education or current situation, inevitably speak in complex sentences, seldom finishing in less than a paragraph, using verbiage reminiscent of an educated Englishman, with influences of culture and personality appearing only as interruptions in or minor affectations to otherwise wicked smooth speech. This, however, inevitably strives to capture the essence of the character, despite the abandonment of a unique speech pattern in favor of a common one, by exposing opinions, motivations, and past details that might otherwise have been difficult to illustrate.
    • As well, certain phrases known as "Claremontisms" show up repeatedly in his work, and his foreign characters speak perfect English except for random interjections in their native language, tovarisch!
    • A helpful list of typical Claremontisms here. Also, as noted below, Claremont characters tend to be well-versed in myth, and a larger than strictly plausible number of them are SF lit geeks.
    • Claremont is also well-known for creating strong, powerful heroines. Who happen to be ludicrously attractive.
  • Frank Miller is famous for his hard-boiled narration, including a play-by-play on every punch, broken rib (it was always a broken rib) and the even nastier things the hero would do to the villain. This was parodied to death during the first black-and-white comic boom, until the market crashed and burned.
  • That would be Adam Warren Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone. Who loves his even more over-the-top pseudo-Miller bits. His recurring favorite. "DON'T.. GO.. INTO.. SHOCK.."
  • With James Robinson, it's not so much writing style as it is a tendency to emphasize words completely at random such that most of his characters must sound like the bastard child of Mr. DeMartino from Daria and Torgo.
    • Robinson also has a propensity for long narrations, either internal, or regular.
  • Comics written by Grant Morrison tend to have endings that go way too fast so that everything can get tied up. The World War III arc of JLA — his last on the book — features all of humanity developing superpowers. We get to see it for three pages. However, works featuring his own characters rather than pre-created ones tend to have better endings.
  • Warren Ellis' comics often feature corrupt government officials, shamanism, cutting-edge technology (and humans enhanced by the same), and a protagonist who is at least two of the following: ill-tempered, British, a chain smoker, or addicted to drugs or alcohol.
    • Don't forget "foul-mouthed and wearing a trenchcoat".
  • Any character created, or heavily influenced by Steve Ditko, will be hated by the general populace. Because the masses are stupid, and the hero is morally (and, consequently, physically and mentally) superior to them.
  • Alan Moore will usually have older characters, who are retired or who have such a large body of work they might as well be retired. This is so they can discuss the good old days of their youth (and Moore's childhood) with nostalgic detail.
    • Bonus points if they have sex for no apparent reason.
      • With a character much, much younger and hotter.
  • Jack Chick will usually have anyone who doesn't agree with him portrayed as working for Satan, or literally being Satan. He is also known for working in his message with all the subtlety of a sumo. Strangely, despite most of his comics taking place in 21st century America (or other first world country), people who are non-Christians are usually non-Christians out of ignorance or malice. In other words, most of of the non-Christians in his stories honestly never heard of Jesus or read any scripture, and are very easily swayed by the evangelists words, despite no arguments or evidence whatsoever.
    • The sad thing is, Jack Chick thinks this crap is realistic.
    • He also really likes to emphasize words in his characters' dialogue using a bold font.
  • Simon Furman, who has, of all the dirty jobs, the position of writing approximately 85% or so of all Transformers comics since the mid-80s, has a number of "Furmanisms" that will inevitably crop up, hanging above the reader like some vast, predatory bird. You won't believe the things he can do with them: this constant shoehorning of odd phrases into the texts never ends, so what chance do we have of avoiding them? One would think he needs a short, sharp lesson in better writing, but the fans seem to enjoy his odd quirks, and he has reaped the whirlwind of popularity he's gained. He writes virtually everything with these "Furmanisms" and more; can we do any less? (A full list can be found at the Transformers Wiki.)
  • Stan Lee writes everyone as a Large Ham. Although he is this way in Real Life too (or at least in interviews) and in his cameos so that makes sense.
  • Fabian Nicieza tends to write long, intricately structured monologues enlivened with lots of dashes — and he also loves bisexuals, genderbending, and Ho Yay.
  • Jhonen Vasquez's works tend to lie far in the cynical end of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, set in Crapsack Worlds where most of the populace are either Jerkasses or Too Dumb To Live. There's also a lot of references to tacos, piggies, bees, doom and other Inherently Funny Words, and he likes adding sci-fi elements like space ships or mech-suits even when the story probably doesn't really need them. Expect Nightmare Fuel, too. Lots and lots of Nightmare Fuel.
  • Mike Mignola's art style is immediately recognizable: the use of circluar and angular shapes (especially the way he draws people), and the way things are defined by large shadowed area more than anything else. His writing style/plotting tends to focus on both Lovecraftian themes, antiquity, and the like.
  • One of Jack Kirby's most distinguishing art features is the aptly-named Kirby Dots. Kirby's overall artistic style is perhaps more of an ur-style, being the style of Jack Kirby, distinctly recognizable to just about any fan of comic book art. He loved to create characters who embodied cosmic power if not outright godhood. As an example, one of his most well-known characters is Galactus.
  • Sergio Aragones (Groo The Wanderer, Mad Magazine) is easily one of the most distinctive cartoonists/caricaturists around. His art style favors thin lines, swooping curves, and an eye-watering level of detail. His men tend to have spindly legs and flat feet, while his women are either fat matronly mothers or curvaceously thin waifs sporting bubble breasts.

Film
  • Quentin Tarantino films are talky, often with long, rambling, roundabout conversations full of old pop-culture references and hipster philosophy that somehow feel natural while still containing dialogue no normal person would ever speak. Most of his films are pastiches of other films and genres, and often feature cinema or the entertainment industry itself as a recurring subject. Some of his films are episodic in plot structure, with "chapters" or chunks arranged out of order. Due to Author Appeal, women's feet will often be highlighted. Tarantino is also fond of a particular shot where the camera passes through a wall or ceiling, which is only later revealed in a subsequent shot.
  • John Woo uses slow-mo, Guns Akimbo, and lots of doves flying in his Heroic Bloodshed movies. Themes in his movies usually focus upon family, loyalty and betrayal, and usually feature two brothers or other people on opposite sides of the law who develop a bond of friendship and usually have to join forces against a mutual enemy who is threatening both.
  • The films of Guillermo del Toro will often favour a specific and small palette (amber for Hellboy, blue-green for El Laberinto del Fauno, yellow/blue for night/day in Blade 2), will frequently go Beneath The Earth, put something slimy in a jar, and always always always include some reference to Roman Catholicism.
  • If Alexandro Jodorowsky directed a movie, you can expect more religious symbolism than you'll find anywhere else and a Shoot The Shaggy Dog ending. (sometimes — like in Fando & Lis and The Holy Mountain — played for laughs)
    • Don't forget his comics. You know, Quentin Tarantino can get away with his foot fetish because feet are something you expect to see occasionally in a movie. But when your fetish is bald women, it's a bit harder to keep hidden.
    • In his films and comics, Jodorowsky displays a keen style of absurdism and everything absurdly symbolic, probably meant as a mockery of various religious beliefs and contemporary practices. His work mixes the celebral and intense with the satirical. I mean, beyond anything else, The Holy Mountain was just so funny. This troper bets Jodorowsky's films make him laugh a lot.
  • Things written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright tend to have clever foreshadowing and dramatic-ironical dialog. Phrases will be repeated, once innocent, once really sad or menacing. Spaced had redonkulous Star Wars references.
    • Things directed by Edgar Wright tend to have lots of fast editing and close-ups.
  • Woody Allen movies generally feature a nebbishy, fussy Jewish New York comedian/writer/detective, who spouts self-deprecating one-liners and Ingmar Bergman references while wooing an attractive woman who is inexplicably attracted to him.
  • Alfred Hitchcock films have a number of recurring features. Often there's a guy or girl unjustly accused, on the run from someone, who has at least one dysfunctional parent, and/or who suddenly vanishes when the love interest takes center place. The motif of abuse of hospitality (either by the guest or the host) is also prevalent. Most female main characters will be blonde, due to Author Appeal. Hitchcock famously made a nonspeaking cameo in every film. In fact, his cameos became so widely known that he was forced to do them in the beginning of his films so viewers wouldn't be distracted from the plot while they looked for him.
  • The Coen Brothers like to make pastiches of other works. Their films often play with language, using heavily stylized dialects from various locations and time periods. Proper heroes are few and far between, with even the most sympathetic characters being criminals or morons. They like to use exaggerated camera movements, an influence from their time working with Sam Raimi.
  • John Milius (of Conan The Barbarian the movie fame) apparently never met a monologue he didn't like, we have to keep those damned commies out of America, and guns/swords are good. Very, very good.
  • If awkward sexual dysfunctions/kinks and Crapsack World suburban mundanity abound, you're probably watching a film directed and written by Todd Solondz.
  • If you are watching a Tim Burton movie you will stumble into at least two of these elements: Pale characters with dark hair, German Expressionism, mutilated or unusual hands, gothic-style spirals, characters with parental issues, grim and surreal settings, and dogs.
  • Danny Boyle's films are frequently marked by the use of sky-high levels of contemporary pop and electronic music, and protagonists emerging from or entering into a toilet.
  • When Michael Bay wakes up in the morning, he moves quickly to get out of his exploding bed, before eating his cereal and tossing out the exploding box. He drives to the studio, jumps out of his exploding car, and then speaks to some dangerous looking government agents, military troops, and disproportionately attractive computer experts, who all promptly explode. He then takes a gun that fires explosions and has a duel with Megan Fox, who also explodes, and then throws away the exploding gun. Finally, he finishes a hard day's work by riding into the sunset on a helicopter, while Linkin Park is playing. The helicopter then explodes.
    • You mean his cereal doesn't explode too?
    • Highly amusing Memetic Mutation aside, Michael Bay does like explosions, but not quite to the extent that the meme says he does... more accurately, he makes almost stereotypical summer action movies, which means there's likely to be a situation for at least a few explosions. He also tends to include very positive portrayals of the American military while not being quite as kind to more secretive government agencies or career politicians, somewhat goofy black characters (which some have called Unfortunate Implications on), and at least one or two characters that talk in his own particular variety of Buffy Speak.
    • Here's an interesting article on Micheal Bay's "style".
    • Don't forget the control room. Michael Bay can't do a movie without control room sequences (most of the stories he tackles can readily justify such sequences.)
  • If you're watching a film by legendary Japanese film director, Ishiro Honda, chances are the film will feature people being overwhelmed by either armies, giant monsters, or some other antagonist. This stems from him being drafted into the Japanese Army during WWII. It's safe to assume the whole ordeal left a HUGE impression on his psyche.
  • Oliver Stone films tend to include a lot of stock footage
  • Dario Argento's trademarks include masked killers, dark gloves, women being pushed through plate glass, tracking shots, and heroes who are involved with some sort of artistic/creative profession who are usually foreigners.
  • Zack Snyder and his slow-mo. To a lesser extent, using extensive green-screening and CG to create very rich images that look almost like art.
  • Yasujirō Ozu is known for his very personal style. Most of his films are family dramas. He uses a number of distinctive shots over and over again, including low-angle shots about 1-2 feet off the ground and shots of characters looking directly in the camera. His editing, transitions, and use of music also follow very specific rules.
  • Spike Lee often makes films about race relations in America, and often uses New York as a setting.
  • Sam Raimi films, especially his early ones, often had a fast-moving POV shot rapidly zooming toward a character. He is also fond dolly zooms, in which the landscape behind a character seems to change size in relation to the character. He often combines the hyperactive camerawork with slapstick humor. He frequently casts his brother Ted Raimi and his longtime friend Bruce Campbell in small roles.
  • The films of Akira Kurosawa tend to have dramatic camera angles, either very low or very high, using telephoto lenses to flatten the perspective, with a distinctive "Wipe" transition; weather elements used to heighten or contrast the mood of a scene; minimalist music; tragic heroes or anti-heroes who have either risen from a lower status, or fallen from a higher, often returning to their previous status; and explorations of the human psyche and condition, particularly among the poor and marginalized. They're also very likely to include Toshiro Mifune in a starring or prominent role.
  • Any Wuxia directed by Zhang Yimou are guaranteed to have a Downer Ending, if not a Kill Em All, a small main cast of four or five people and about...a bazillion extras. See: Hero, House Of Flying Daggers, Curse Of The Golden Flower.

Literature
  • JK Rowling's only written one series to date, but she's sure fond of killing off parents and parental figures, to the point that not many people were surprised when Mad-Eye Moody got killed off within the first hundred pages of Deathly Hallows. Just about anyone Harry could rely on to help fight had to be either jailed, put on the run after narrow escapes, or killed.
    • On a lighter note, she also has a fondness for socks as comedic devices.
    • She also uses four periods in ellipses instead of three. When two different "leaked" versions of Deathly Hallows hit the web, fans knew which was real due to the ellipses.
      • As much as this is a nice story, my UK Hardback copies of the book use 3 periods to an ellipsis.
  • Peter David is quite fond of incredibly drawn-out, horrible puns (for example, in Sir Apropos of Nothing, taking a full page to explain why a group of crazy bird-men descended from harpies are called the Harpers Bizarre) and Ironic Echo Cut chapter breaks. He's also very fond of the adverb "nattily": if his work is set in modern times, expect everybody to be "nattily dressed."
    • David also enjoys the Running Gag. One notable example from one of his Star Trek novels had a Vulcan character simply trying to go from one part of the ship to another and constantly running into a string of people, from fellow crewmembers to an alien ambassador, who all insisted on telling her their current personal problems. She finally blows a gasket and demands to know why everyone was telling her. (Well, the closest to gasket-blowing a Vulcan usually gets, anyway.)
    • Another aspect of his Star Trek writing is a very thorough knowledge of the show, with in-jokes, Shout Outs, and obscure references everywhere. This is epitomized in 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 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?
  • Robert Rankin's style makes it obvious that he's making it up as he goes along, as he lampshades in one book, pointing out plot threads that don't go anywhere. Sometimes it works, and sometimes... it just doesn't.
  • Tom Holt has incredible fun with metaphors, cliches and truisms; if the book is full of metaphors taken to extremes, it's probably him. He also tends to feature mopey, nerdy males and rock-hard, super-efficient females. His stories also have an extremely cynical view of love, which is often portrayed as more of a nuisance or a disease than anything actually good.
  • Terry Pratchett is fond of irony, wordplay, and justifying the natural laws of his worlds as being literally governed by tropes and cliches, which people can use to their own advantage if they're Genre Savvy 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. His books also very rarely use conventional chapters. His earlier works in particular like to play with the idea of unearthly eyes, and particularly the idea that the eyes are the only thing that no magic can disguise, providing a window to the true nature of the soul. 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
    • Footnotes spanning several pages stick in the mind; this troper merely can't remember which books...
      • The difference in writing voice between Pratchett and Douglas Adams can be distinguished mainly by frequency of footnotes. Although Adams has a few as well.
      • Another giveaway is that Adams doesn't sound like imitation Douglas Adams as often.
      • To be fair, he's lightened up considerably on the footnotes over the years. This Troper isn't even sure there's a single one in the last five books (and if there are, they aren't complete digressions like they used to be).
      • There are a fair number sprinkled through the later books. This troper loves them and wishes he would bring back more.
      • And he seems to love the words 'strata' and 'apologetic'.
      • "It is a pune, or play on words." pops up a lot.
      • Speaking of Punes, Terry is inordinately fond of characters who immediately try to describe why a certain thing is funny before other characters could even react to said joke.
  • Piers Anthony is another fantasy author with a great love of wordplay and cliche; however, the two authors' styles are recognizably different in that, if Pratchett's wit is like a rapier, then Anthony's is like a 12-pound sledgehammer. His Xanth series, in particular, is one great big Hurricane Of Puns after another, but his other works can be similarly blunt and heavy-handed at times. Other heavy-handed examples of his style include making nearly every protagonist a moral paragon who never does anything wrong and never fails at anything, and a desire to revisit old plot points ad nauseam.
    • Some would point out that this is just the Theory Of Narrative Causality in another form.
    • Another reoccurring theme in Anthony's works is nudity and sexuality, even in his young adult / teen series, Xanth. Anthony is pretty frank about his beliefs — he doesn't believe human nudity is harmful or shameful at all, and he remembers that most of the people of his target audience's age are actually quite curious about sexuality, despite what their parents may think. His works are never outright pornographic, but it skirts the boundaries enough (mermaids turning into humans and not knowing about clothes, princesses having to trade their clothes for a magic sword, that kind of thing) that he's been accused of being a pedophile on several occasions.
      • Um, not outright pornographic? He actually wrote a book named Pornucopia, and another named 3.97 Erect. And at one point, in a letter to a young teenage girl, talked about writing about a five-year-old having sex. (See the book Letters to Jenny.) The accusations are really no one's fault but his own.
    • And, like Claremont, everyone sounds the same and seems to have the same knowledge of relatively obscure myths and legends that most people wouldn't acquire unless they were very into it and had possibly taken college courses (even if that someone is a junior high dropout who's spent his whole life as a hired goon). For example, in his Incarnations of Immortality series, it's not all that rare for someone to see the Incarnation of Death and blurt out "Thanatos!"
    • And also the use of children/extended family of characters he's already used, to the point where the Royal Family of Xanth is on something like its fourth generation.
    • Not everybody uses the word "demesnes." Piers Anthony uses it frequently.
    • It is perhaps easier to think of Anthony as like Terry Pratchett, but less mature. Or perhaps the other way around.
  • L. E. Modesitt, Jr. tells the same story over and over again in most of his books. It's a good story, though, so this troper keeps reading them anyway.
    • And Mercedes Lackey, several of whose trilogies consist of telling the same story three times in a row, and who has even written a trilogy with a center book (Owlknight) in which essentially nothing happens (a barbarian invasion turns out at the climax to be boring peaceful settlers instead).
      • Another Mercedes Lackey signature: taking a character who has grown up living in serious misery without family, usually without real pleasures or more than one or two friends, then having them get swept up, as in a Changeling Fantasy, and taken to somewhere with good people and comforts, where there is hard work and good food. Said character basically never brings along the optional friend, nor do they ever go back, and they always turn into Standard Lackey Hero characters, who are all uniform in their goodness. There is a long period of adjustment where the character makes friends, and towards the very end there is a rushed conclusion. Seriously, this happens in very nearly every book, more often now than in her earlier work. It's alleviated significantly when she collaborates with different authors, though the book she wrote with Piers Anthony was cringe-worthy.
      • A key Lackey trademark is her standard protagonist development sequence, which has been summarized as "make the readers love and adore the hero, and then tear said hero's arms off."
    • And Terry Brooks, many of whose Shannara novels resemble each other to a surprising degree.
      • To the extent that a friend of This Troper once claimed that each new book was 'written' with Word's find/replace feature... replace 'sword of Shannara' with 'Elfstones of Shannara'... His Magic Kingdom series isn't nearly as bad about it.
  • Neal Stephenson has a unique ending style. Instead of a gradually accelerating pace and then a denouement, they stay at about the same pace until about 3/4ths through the book, where everything falls to pieces and the pace feels like someone left a brick on the accelerator. Then it ends, and you're looking at "Other Works by This Author" so quickly that it almost feels you missed the ending chapter. It's not that they don't have an ending, really, it's that they hit it going so fast and it's so short that you'd never see it coming unless you're watching the page count.
    • He's also very fond of the "X would like nothing more than Y. Which is too bad, considering he's Z right now" form, and its opposite : "The last thing X wants right now is Y. Which is why, as Y happens, he does Z".
  • HP Lovecraft. It is fortunate that humanity, in its blissful ignorance of the maddening, cyclopean world beyond, doesn't possess the words to describe the repulsive, non-euclidean things of which he speaks. HPL has the most Signature Style in the history of styles.
    • Even his stories that don't feature eldritch abominations from outside time and space tend to treat women and foreigners as equally scary.
    • Don't forget his habit of putting The Reveal 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. Small scale Anachronic Order, if you will.
    • And while we're on the subject, Edgar Allan Poe. These two authors together more-or-less define Antiquated Linguistics.
      • But Poe also had his own Signature Style. If he wasn't writing a Dupin story, he usually featured a skeptical and normally problematic narrator that tried to face the supernatural reasonably, but ended engulfed by madness. His stories generally ended in a very abrupt, anti-climactic way. And there'd be a beautiful woman dying of tuberculosis.
  • Brian Jacques seems to love Wacky Wayside Tribes, rhyming prophecies, intense description of food, and making damn sure none of his heroes ever die. This last element has only slid in over time; while the earlier Redwall books were willing to let heroes die (Martin the Warrior and Outcast of Redwall most notably), the later ones have the "hero shield" at full power.
    • This doesn't apply in Castaways of the Flying Dutchman, which hasn't suffered the Redwall series's cumulative decay: the fisherman in the first book, the French captain in the second book, and Serafina in the third book all died rather horribly.
    • He also has a thing for giving characters names beginning with the letter M.
  • George R.R. Martin: sex (including what almost everybody would call perversion), intensely described violence (including against those generally exempt in sci-fi or fantasy, i.e. infants), wheels within wheels, and a general feeling that the author will not spare your pathetic sensibilities if he thinks it furthers theme, plot, or characterization. Expect to ask "Wait, who am I rooting for?" at least once.
  • 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.
    • Oh, and don't forget that whenever Wulfgar's hammer hit someone, it "blasted" them. As a child, this troper thought the hammer was explosive for a long time.
  • Stephen King is known for frequent use of a distinctive
(stream of consciousness)
writing style which incorporates the character's thoughts into a paragraph, typically
breaking the standard paragraph structure as he goes along.
  • When he wrote using the pseudonym Richard Bachman, people suspected it was him based on his style.
  • And don't forget the endless describing of daily life inconsequentia. A less charitable troper would call it padding.
    • He cheerfully points out in the intro of The Stand that critics have accused him of suffering "diarrhea of the typewriter".
  • He also tends to write stories with protagonists that have at least two of the following three characteristics: great wealth, being a writer, and having suffered a horrific injury with an agonizing recovery. Guess what three characteristics the man himself has...
    • In his earlier novels, the characters often are teachers (like King was), lower-class, and hadn't been maimed.
  • Michael Moorcock loves the initials J.C.. He did this quite deliberately, to show that they reprsented aspects of the same archetype.
  • Similarly, Philip Jose Farmer used the initial PJF to refer to his stand-ins, according to him.
  • The late Jack Chalker almost never wrote a book that didn't involve at least one character (and often all of them) physically transformed in some way, either to a different species, a different gender, a different kind of sapience, or some combination thereof.
    • To the point of reportedly getting quite upset when people kept asking him why all he wrote were transformation stories. His answer was "Nobody bought the non-transformation books." Reputedly, he got used to it when he realized every author with a shtick got asked the same thing.
  • Dan Brown, a renowned Conspiracy Thriller author, conspicuously and regularly re-uses plot elements and opening paragraphs. As for the actual writing style, Brown is fond of having multiple Plot Threads and shifting between them every 5 to 10 pages (his chapters are really short), usually with a What Cliffhanger accompanying every shift. Depending on whom you ask, it either creates awesome thriller suspense or gets boring after the third page.
  • Chuck Palahniuk has a very distinct minimalist style of writing that he describes as explaining only the kernel of any given situation, with the action cutting and jumping around sporadically and tied in place by a common, repeating theme. Beyond that, he also tends to have very similar female characters from book to book.
    • He often fills his books with a number of interesting tidbits of knowledge as well as factoids that sound real but aren't.
    • Sentence fragments with no verb in them.
  • Gene Wolfe writes all of his stories in first person. With all the detail he adds, it gets really easy to trust the narrator. Don't.
  • Neil Gaiman has a distinct poetic bent to his writing and themes, which is just one of the things that make him popular with the goth crowd. Every line a Gaiman character utters can be quoted on its own as a lesson on life and magic and whatever.
    • Neil Gaiman also likes to throw in a Magnificent Bastard who may or may not have a heart of gold. Theological references, too.
    • Also loves to have stories within stories within stories, and blurring the lines between them. An obvious example of it would be the World's End Sandman story, in which travelers stranded by a freak storm (caused by the Meta Plot) are passing the time by telling each other stories, in the style of The Canterbury Tales or Bocacchio's Decameron. One of the stories is about a ship journey, during which, to alleviate boredom, one of the tale's character (Hob) tells another tale. Hob being an important character in the Meta Plot, we've come full circle and back again.
    • Another, subtler trope in Gaiman's work is the theme of false hospitality, typically shown between female characters: the Other Mother in Coraline is the most obvious example, while others include the Dark Queen in Mirror Mask (which is thematically very similiar to Coraline) the inn scene in Stardust, and the characters of Media and Bilquis in American Gods.
  • James Joyce is bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!
  • William Faulkner hates you doesn't like you hates you you never had a sister
    sister. Stream of consciousness, odd spacing
    hate you
    south.
    i dont hate it
    fish
    but he hates you
    • He also has a reputation for writing confusingly long sentences.
  • Djuna Barnes loves her statements that aren't nonsensical so much as they don't make sense. And she always makes blanket statements. And supremely illogical cultural references. And loads of sex, happening in the most absurd places.
  • Tennessee Williams writes a lot of mentally ill or physically disabled women (his Dead Little Sister was schizophrenic), and a lot of his stuff is set in the Deep South. Also, expect men who are manly men, explicit discussion of any issues he wants to bring up, and... well, there's more. You'd know it if you saw it.
    • The aforementioned overt masculinity also carries over to his homosexual characters; see Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws and A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot. (Williams himself was gay.)
  • Diane Carey's Star Trek novels take Space Is An Ocean to almost absurd heights. She has worked on sailing ships in Real Life.
  • Diane Duane's Trek novels are full of Starfish Aliens with unpronounceable names, amazingly detailed and justified Techno Babble, gleefully subverted Planets of Hats, and Doctor McCoy being awesome.
    • Apart from the McCoy thing, that's also a fair description of her Young Wizards series.
  • Dean Koontz' supernatural works, at least, tend to feature some combination of dogs, Catholicism, California, and little kids. And, regardless if they're supernatural or not, sex. Quite a bit of sex.
  • William Shakespeare, in addition to his poetic manner of writing, is also fond of references to falconry, gardening, and hunting with dogs. He also thinks it's hilarious when women dress up as men, but that was a fairly standard thing back then. He's also the undisputed king of penis jokes. And he really seems to like twins, almost as much as he likes Italy.
  • Thomas Pynchon loves silly pop-culture references, names that sound meaningful but aren't, and not giving you any idea what's going on. Sophisticated As Hell terminology is not uncommon either.
  • David Eddings: Strictly Formula, but done right for the most part. He's also big on Loads And Loads Of Characters and glowing jewels that drive the plot.
  • Tom Clancy's novels tend to feature certain politically incorrect characterizations: liberals tend to be scheming and drug-using liberals, while conservatives tend to be hard-working, honest, and red-blooded members of the American military. Every book ends with an America Saves The Day moment, as well.
    • Not to mention the borderline-fetishistic way he describes military hardware in excruciatingly precise detail.
    • And every weapon that is not American is in some way inferior to its American counterpart.
  • Anything by Laurell K Hamilton is almost certain to have a tiny, beautiful female main character who's a good little Catholic girl that has to deal with shameful shameful sexual urges and has lots and lots of sex that's treated as if it's the kinkiest thing since the Marquis de Sade, but is actually rather tame in comparison to almost anything you could see on Playboy TV. Oh, and random powerups. And mournful observation of religion/faith falling into decline.
  • Agatha Christie used a number of devices over and over in her works.
    • Multiple murders committed by different people.
    • Characters revealed to have been impersonating other characters.
    • If a person repeatedly survives attempts being made on their life, you can bet that that person is the killer.
    • Whoever is most likely to be the killer will naturally be innocent. This is logical, since a straightforward murder mystery wouldn't be much of a mystery. Still, the number of clues speaking to someone's guilt are often inversely proportional to that person's guilt.
    • Whoever is included on the novel's token romance(s) is innocent.
    • Characters accusing themselves of being the murderer in order to protect the person they know or believe to be the real killer. Subverted in Murder in the Vicarage, where both Lawrence Redding and Anne Protheroe frame themselves for the murder of Colonel Protheroe and admit, in turn, to being responsible (in an unusual ploy to actually shift blame from both of them)
  • J. R. R. Tolkien had a habit of peppering his stories with references to far-away bygone people and places drawn from his own mythos that had nothing to do with the plot but made the setting feel more lived-in and natural.
  • Kurt Vonnegut: lots of free-association and repetition, nonstop Shooting the Shaggy Dog, Sick Sad Worlds with the bleakness turned up to 11, and the heaviest anvils he can lift, peppered with really horrible felt-pen sketches.
  • Anton Chekhov had a habit of ending his short stories in a way that doesn't really resolve the plot at all. The protagonist is usually a normal Russian man who Chekhov characterizes mostly through his flaws.
  • Ben Elton novels tend to have large ensemble casts and at least one, usually brutal, death or attempt on someone's life. They also tend to be overtly critical of one aspect of society, and achieve this criticism through sarcasm and exaggeration (Dead Famous and Chart Throb — reality television; Gridlock — society's dependence on cars and oil; Stark — big business in the 1980s; This Other Eden — DAMN NEAR EVERYTHING).
  • John "A PC" Hodgman writes his books in a perfectly deadpan, neutral tone, and just happens to drop the occasional incredibly humourous comment into his rhetoric. A Long List is quite likely, too. He also enjoys occasionally breaking into ALL CAPS.
  • Ian Fleming often includes expositions on locations he had visited, and especially foods and drink which he was himself fond of. Expect the phrase "the gun spoke its word" to appear rather frequently too. The attitudes of the characters are also highly recognisable once one gets used to them. And any woman's breasts will be described as "proud and firm". Except maybe Bond's caretaker's.
  • Ursula Vernon's writing can be recognized by her use of people who supply contraceptives to "Seamstresses", weird animals (commonly shrews or wombats, some times weird people) and general weirdly flash-bang, yet Pratchett-esque, often footnoted, style.
    • She also tends to give her fictional cultures a detailed and unique culture, customs, traditions, idioms, and so forth, often sewn together from real-world parts. Probably not surprising, given that she used to be an anthropologist and turned to art "because the pay was better, which should tell you something about anthropology."
    • Her art is what brought us the Lol Whut pear.
    • Lolwhut aside, her usual art also involves the combination of normal concepts (for example, a painting of grazing wildlife) with bizarre objects or characters (the wildlife is fruit), with at least a paragraph's worth of backstory on the art piece itself (a nature-book-esque description of the fruit's habitat and behavior in the wild).
  • Terry Goodkind used to write sweeping fantasy with a touch of humour and some nasty violence until 9/11. Then he wrote jingoistic Objectivist fantasy with some really nasty violence,and an evil empire who was trying to take over the world in such a manner that only one man had the 'moral clarity' to oppose them.
  • Andre Norton tended to have female characters orphaned as babies and raised by nonhumans who improvised clothing for them early on, despite generally not wearing clothing themselves. She also liked cats.
  • Aaron Allston, one of the writers of the X Wing Series, 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 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.
  • Karen Traviss, in the Star Wars Expanded Universe and her own books, loves Proud Warrior Races. Any character who doesn't spend most of the book freaked out is generally a ruthless, hard-bitten veteran of one kind or another with no real ties to other people, and has some Jerkass tendencies. Gold hearts are supposedly in there, but they show through very grudgingly and only after a dog-kick or two.
  • James Patterson. Just...James Patterson. He italicizes every fucking thing of any importance. See When The Wind Blows and The Lake House and make a drinking game out of how many times the Flock's flying is drawn attention to. Also, half page chapters.
  • Raymond E. Feist loves to use the words "alien" and "quietly" as often as possible, especially chapters/segments which begin with "(character name) sat quietly."
    • He also opens the majority of his chapters with a three or four word sentence, beginning in Magician with "The storm had broken.".
  • Larry Niven writes about Giant Space Structures (the ringworld, the smoke ring), sex between different alien species, and really long alien names with lots of a'postr'oph'es in them.
  • Cormac McCarthy doesnt use many apostrophes when writing speech and he doesnt use speech marks to indicate dialogue and the Deep South or the west are common settings and he frequently uses 'and' a lot in a sentence.
    • Furthermore, he's partial to esoteric word choices as well as run-on sentences, not to mention sentences of unusually long length, one example being a page-and-a-half long sentence in Blood Meridian.
  • Stephenie Meyer is fond of portraying SPESHUL human/nonhuman romances, with all of the main characters being implausibly gorgeous (and described with lots and lots of purple prose). She also has a thing for the word "chagrin," as well as "dazzled" and "perfect", and the color beige. She describes characters' daily lives in a highly detailed manner while not doing the same for action scenes, which drags her books out to borderline Door Stopper lengths.
    • Note that most of these are traits that could be considered a stereotypical Signature Style of teenage girls writing fanfiction.
      • Especially teenage fanfiction by fans of the series.
  • Tamora Pierce has a mildly amusing habit of describing a character's clothing in detail. This lead to one famous scene where Alanna of Tortall, hardened warrior, is talking to a friend about someone else's poor fashion choices while changing. "Can you imagine?"
  • Michael Crichton books inevitably share the same plot: "Scientist discovers or creates something. Protagonist warns the scientist that he hasn't considered the consequences. Discovery and/or creation Goes Horribly Wrong. Protagonist saves the day. Protagonist says "I told you so" and scientist maybe or maybe not learns his lesson that Science Is Bad, or at least misapplied. The end."
    • Despite this, Crichton was a huge proponent of scientific discovery and the importance of science in general. Just don't mention climate change.
  • Hey Doctor Who fans! Did that last Expanded Universe novel make your brain feel like it was shoved in a blender set to "puree"? Did it feature people doing exceptionally odd things to Time? Was The Obi Wan a Deadpan Snarker? A Magnificent Bastard? Both? Well, my friend, you were probably reading a novel by Lawrence Miles.
  • Jim Butcher of The Dresden Files and Codex Alera fame really, really likes political intrigue, characters with ulterior motives, complex and out of the ordinary strategies in battle, characters playing Xanatos Roulette, and unique and unexpected application of magic.
  • James Clavell liked to write large novels set in or around Asia, featuring Loads And Loads Of Characters and intricate, interwoven plots from both the protagonist's and antagonist's sides of the stories. His books are usually divided into shorter "books" or chapters that encompass a period of time (from three years in King Rat to just about ten days in Noble House). Also, at least one main character will die at the end of each of his books (except for King Rat, where the death was merely figurative, rather than literal).
  • David Wong of John Dies At The End and Cracked fame tends to have work that is very cynical, heavy on the pop culture and full of Sophisticated As Hell, often explaining complex concepts with monkeys, kittens, and the aforementioned pop culture references. His Cracked articles tend to revolve around achieving happiness.
  • Charles Bukowski's work could be summed up as thoughtful insights using mundane metaphors for some of the most mudanely depresing situations done in the plainest of text. Also, lots of alcohol, sex, gambling, self-deprecation and jokes worthy of a 14 year old kid. I love him.
  • Lord Dunsany's signature style is a dreamy prose filled with Antiquated Linguistics. Think a Lighter And Softer Lovecraft, particularly early Dream Cycle Lovecraft (unsurprising since he was a major influence on the crazy Yankee), though he was quite capable of putting an edge into his stories. His later fiction loses some of this style, leading to a They Changed It Now It Sucks reaction from some fans.
  • Timothy Zahn starts each of his 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 likes pulling an As You Know by mentioning X, then having a different character say "Oh, that's [rough explanation], right?"
    • Stormtroopers are extremely competent. Imperials in general are not evil, and neither are they about to switch sides. They have pride in what they do and get presented as just as human as anyone in the New Republic. There are ruthless people on both sides and the Imperials are still the villains, but it's far less black-and-white than most writers will make it.
      • This is true of Zahn's non-Star Wars novels as well. The Conqueror Trilogy is a good example of this; neither side of the conflict is bad, and both sides include the sort of multiple factions that you'd actually find in a society at war.
    • He's one of the best at complicated plotlines with several protagonists who go in separate directions, have their own plot-important actions and multiple subplots, and come together and separate again as part of the larger plot. Seriously, all of his multi-protagonist books have these.
    • Zahn really likes coolly intelligent, calculating characters, both villainous and non, and has confessed to favoring enhanced soldiers and also criminal types who have redeeming features, like Karrde, Car'das, and one of the protagonists of the Dragonback series.
  • K.A. Applegate, in the series that she's written (Animorphs, Everworld, and Remnants), always uses a choppy first-person, in which sentences are short. They're about this long. And are often fragmented. With pop culture references. And slang. And lots of expies.
  • Frederick Forsyth is extremely well known for his obsession with correct details, intense amounts of research, and almost journalistic approach to writing.
  • Mark Z. Danielewski tends to write in either a dry, formal, academic tone or a very lyrical and sometimes almost nonsensical one (House of Leaves mixes both). He also really, really, really likes meaningful mis-spellings ("torn to pisces", "allways sixteen"), hidden coded messages, and the use of different font colors to highlight particular letters or words.
  • When you read a sci-fi story, and it tells you proliferation of helicopters and telecommunication technologies allowed the humans to abandon the cities (barring, perhaps, cultural and academic centers) and return to forests and meadows they've always longed for, you can bet it's Arthur C Clarke.
  • Sandy Mitchell, of Ciaphas Cain fame, has a few old standbys. Cain's palms will be described as tingling at least ten times per novel. A remarkable amount of people are in some way preternatural. Often, something causes a susurrus. Cain frequently ends up in caves or some similar system, allowing him to remark repeatedly on how he knows his way around caves as a result of his childhood. British pop culture references are made.
  • Michael A. Stackpole, in and out of the X Wing Series, drops many offhand references about the 'verse he's writing in by Techno Babble and mentions of unusual cultural quirks held by different species. These tend not to be elaborated on; they're there to make the 'verse bigger. His earlier novels tended to have Beige Prose. 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 Red Shirt characters with almost no characterization or dialogue, and all of that is connected to that confident protagonist. There are literally characters in the X Wing Series whose 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.
  • Homer and the phrase "wine-dark sea".
  • Gertrude Stein certainly had a quite distinctive style. Gertrude Stein had a certainly quite distinctive style. Gertrude Stein had a quite certainly distinctive style. Gertrude Stein quite certainly had a distinctive style.
  • Iain M. Banks' science fiction novels, both in The Culture, and the stand-alone ones often feature a lot of snarky humor, especially at cocktail parties or something similar. There will sometimes be a Wacky Wayside Tribe scene with some other culture or species which tends to overlap with another feature, a scene of outright Gorn (i.e. the way the protagonist of ''Consider Phlebas stops cannibals from eating him). The novel may or may not end with the deaths of the cast and many other unfortunate people.

Live Action TV
  • Russell T Davies has a penchant for using the names "Tyler", "Rose", "Delaney", "Donna", "Harkness" and "Jones" (Most evident in "The Stolen Earth", which features four pre-existing Joneses). He likes to reference Ipswich. Ominous references to "the darkness" and "something is coming" abound. He often criticises religion and has a love of Humanist monologues ("Indomitable!"). He's prone to excessive use of Techno Babble in his Doctor Who stories, though for Who, this is no new thing.
    • Of course, some Doctor Who fans complain that RTD doesn't use enough Techno Babble, claiming his sketchy explanations for whatever effect he wants to produce might as well be "A Wizard Did It". Major offenders include the "anti-plastic" in "Rose" and every Deus Ex Machina season finale.
    • Fans often seem divided by his assumed "Gay Agenda", with everything from jokes from gay culture to same-sex kisses having found their way into his four Doctor Who series.
    • For an atheist, RTD won an award for irony when "Gridlock" (featuring renditions of "The Old Rugged Cross" and "Abide With Me") got nominated by a religious group for a prize for promoting Biblical values.
      • Although his work is noticeably stuffed full of religious imagery. Notable examples include "Last of the Time Lords" (The Doctor being rejuvenated by the entire populace of Earth praying for him, flying over the evil Master, then hugging him and saying "I forgive you.") and Torchwood's "End of Days" (essentially the same thing, with resurrected Jack forgiving the doubting Owen after... well, killing the Devil.) Davies' drama "The Second Coming" was nothing but religion, though of the kind that takes Nietzsche very literally...
      • And who could forget the moment in RTD's second ever episode of Doctor Who, "The End of the World", when we see the Earth burning away beneath a giant glowing space station ''in the shape of a crucifix''...◊
    • He also likes to use repetitive jokes, pop-culture references (often to reality TV and often appealing to the Lowest Common Denominator), and extraneous guest stars. Although '80's Doctor Who also tended to have a lot of name guest stars.
  • Joss Whedon cannot get by without at least one superpowered tiny female character, a tendency to put likeable characters through the Wangst gauntlet, and an almost contractual Bittersweet Ending (at best).
    • He's not below hanging a lampshade on this:
      • "I tend to focus on one character (perhaps a young woman of unnatural abilities, to pull an example randomly out of nowhere) and then the other characters are built from the needs of that character's journey."
      There's been a lot of comparison to the story of Echo being a sort of warped interpretation of the River Tam story, do you agree/disagree? — Vivienne
      It wasn't meant that way, but I do have my little obsessions...
    • He's also fond of naming characters after things; just as a random sampling, Angel, Spike, Willow, Dawn, Faith, Glory, Harmony, Gunn, Jasmine, River, Wash, and Book.
      • Plus, the Actives in Dollhouse are named after the US military alphabet (e.g. Alpha, Echo, Victor, and Sierra).
    • His penchant for snappy dialogue, snarkasm, and Buffy Speak is very distinctive. He did some Script Doctor work on the script of the first X-Men movie, but only two exchanges of dialogue made it to the final cut, and one of them has his fingerprints all over it:
      Wolverine: Hey! It's me.
      Cyclops: Prove it!
      Wolverine: You're a dick.
      Cyclops: [Shrugs, nods.] Okay.
      • The other, Storm's line about a toad getting hit by lightning, doesn't seem like his style; however, before his contributions were reduced, it was the deadpan climax to a highly Whedonesque Running Gag.
      • In Atlantis The Lost Empire, it's "extremely" obvious which lines Whedon wrote. A sample Whedonesque line:
        Milo: Will you look at the size of this? It's gotta be a half mile high, at least. It must have taken hundred — no, thousands of years to carve this thing!
        Column: BOOM!
        Vinny: Look, I made a bridge. It only took me, like, what? Ten seconds? Eleven, tops.
    • His penchant for Women In Refrigerators (or perhaps just Anyone Can Die in general) is called out during the Dr. Horrible Comic-Con panel: "You kill a lot of chicks."
  • Terry Nation (Doctor Who, Blake's 7, The Survivors) liked doomed (and argumentative) groups of rebels fighting Scary Dogmatic Aliens like the Nazi-esque Daleks (which he invented) or in the case of B7, Scary Dogmatic Humans. He also liked ragtag (and argumentative) groups of survivors in After The End settings, and in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", he even got to combine the two fascinations. He also had a great fondness for characters with the last name Tarrant and, often, characters with no first names ever given. A strong streak of cynicism runs through his work, making his favourite characters Deadpan Snarkers.
    • Look out also for his tendency to make up for his total aversion to Techno Babble by adding the word 'space' to existing nouns. Someone will be a doctor of 'space medicine'; an alien race's headquarters is referred to as being 'in Space' by space-travellers, and so on.
  • Aaron Sorkin, father of the Sorkin Walk and Sorkin Relationship Moment: machine gun fast dialogue. Comedic repetition. Tall, smart, sexy, sassy women who give as good as they get. Characters who veer oh-so-close to cynicism, only to come back to hope and idealism. Extremely liberal world view. He actually included common criticisms of his writing style in his short play Hidden in this Picture. In it, a film director tells his Sorkin-proxy screenwriter, "I think your work has a tendency to be long-winded and cynical, I think you have trouble handling exposition, you take forever to introduce the inciting action, and all your female characters talk and act as if they've just stepped off the Love Boat."
    • He also really, really likes to use the name Danny.
    • And the same character types. Watch The American President and The West Wing and then tell me A.J. Mac Inerney and Leo Mc Garry aren't the same character. Same with Lewis Rothschild and Josh Lyman, and that gets more fun when you add in Studio 60 and A Few Good Men, because Matt Albie and Dan Caffee are also the same character as Lewis and Josh.
      • Since West Wing began as leftover scenes from American President, the characters really are the same, at least at first.
    • He loves Talking About That Thing, to the point of Never Give The Captain A Straight Answer. It will often be five to seven minutes into the conversation before the audience learns what The Thing is.
    • He also likes to refer to offscreen characters multiple times by their full names before introducing them or explaining their purpose in the story.
      • And main characters often imply full sentences in arguments just by using the other character's first name.
    • Is the season finale named "What Kind of a Day Has It Been"? You're watching the first season of an Aaron Sorkin show.
    • Not to mention his love of dramatic speeches. Is there a self-righteous villain in the piece? Then there will be a scene in which he delivers something not far short of a sermon, usually in response to hard questioning (in a legal setting), in which he concludes with a highly-quotable, exceptionally angry declaration which leaves everyone speechless.
      • See Malice and A Few Good Men.
  • In every show Bryan Fuller has ever created, the female lead has a boy's name.

Music
  • Amongst composers, Frank Zappa is known for his highly peculiar style. On guitar, he favored a Clarence Brown or Johnny Watson-inspired complex, left hand fingering, with lots of interaction with the drummer. As a composer, he loved to glue together separate elements and styles in an unpredictable collage of music. As a song writer, he is typified by industrial-strength sarcasm and a dislike of feminism. And he had a big nose and Johnny Otis's imperial mustache (recurring elements on album art).
  • Nick Cave, throughout the songs he's written, the novel (And The Ass Saw The Angel) and the film screenplay (The Proposition) has shown an enormous interest in four things: flowers, stomach-churning violence, discussion of literature — often in very unlikely places, and semi-heretical yet extremely pious examinations of religion.
  • If you see someone onstage playing a left-handed Hofner violin bass in something resembling a classic Beatlesuit, he is either Paul McCartney or someone trying to impersonate him as a Beatle. If he is playing anything written after Revolver, or if there are no other Beatles impersonators, it's the real thing.
  • Every single Dragon Force song features the phrase "for the day", "far away", at least one reference to fire/warriors, and is at least three-quarters epic guitar solos. They're also all in the same time, key, and tempo.
  • Similarly, virtually every Manowar song is about stoic macho warriors waving swords while splashing through their enemies' blood like Gene Kelly dancing to "Singing In The Rain".
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has a habit where a number of pieces he writes have sections that end with a prominent trill at the big cadence.
  • Nine Inch Nails albums are usually concept albums. His music kept the exact same introspective subject matter (love, death, meaning etc) from the late 1980s to the early 2000s and reuses/d words like 'skin', 'broken', 'hole', 'bleeding', 'head', 'feels', 'falling/loss' etc. He both whispers and shouts a lot, often in the same song.
  • Johnny Cash had a very sparse, stripped down style. This paired with his smooth bass-baritone voice made even his (numerous) covers immediately recognizable.
  • Joni Mitchell was afflicted with polio at age nine, and lost some use of her left hand. Her compositions use very distinctive non-standard guitar tunings ("Joni's weird chords") that accommodate her limited dexterity—and also sound very cool.
  • Umm... Jim Steinman, anyone? Almost every song has three distinct movements, is at least 7 minutes long, features a choir of angels at some point, and sounds like Meat Loaf is singing it, even if it's actually Bonnie Tyler or Air Supply.
  • If the lyrics you're listening have a lot of not-so-common words, seem to make no sense, go from spanish to english or vice versa and are sung in falsetto it was most likely writen by Cedric Bixler-Zavala. The afro is quite stylish too.
  • There's a joke that each Power Metal band picks their own theme (eg. aforementioned Manowar) and puts it into most of their songs.
  • Tom Waits has his voice, and the tendency to use deliberately antiquated recording techniques. And it's not uncommon to come across references to Kathleen Brennan, his wife. The name "Beaula" crops up a lot, as do trains, rain, and the word "down". He also uses his instruments in very bizarre, hard-to-describe ways.
  • They Might Be Giants have an accordion. Both the Johns have pretty distinctive voices, there's a lot of rhythmic stuff going on, and the lyrics are sort of hard to comprehend the first few listenings.
  • Voltaire loves the violin and lyrics that would be kinda disturbing if they weren't so funny, except for the occasional philosophical, contemplative song. Even those usually contain a bit of wit.

Music Videos
  • Michel Gondry has one hell of a personal style. Most of his videos are weird in one or more ways. Some have trippy morphing environments and multiplying objects; others are set in a crude, theater-like scenery and feature puppets. He may also break the boundary between an in-video fiction (TV show/book/dream) and reality, or make a musicological rendition of the song. And if it's filmed with a shaky camera, it might also be one continuous shot.
  • If it's a Tool video, it's going to feature some form of stop-motion animation, eerie and disturbing imagery, the characters will come straight out of the Uncanny Valley, and the band won't be in the video. The only major aversion to this is "Hush".

Professional Wrestling
  • Professional Wrestling writer Vince Russo has cultivated a signature style characterized largely by Americentrism, misogyny, Shocking Swerves, and the attention span of a gnat. Fans often refer to storylines and gimmicks that show Russo's fingerprints as "Russo-riffic"; it should be noted that this is very much not a compliment.
    • Also, pole matches. Insane objects on top of poles at every corner of the ring. Expect any sort of tangible object being the center of a dispute to be put on a pole. And if there is no object in dispute, he'll put a weapon of some sort on a pole. Just because.

Theater
  • Tim Rice likes his idioms. Also never has more than two female protagonists.
    • His lyrics also have a remarkable ability to sound like normal conversations that just coincidentally happen to fit a certain rhythm and rhyme scheme.
    • He also has the tendency to make bizarre, out-of-context racial slurs, like Judas' bizarre verse about "a jaded Mandarin" in Jesus Christ Superstar or Potiphar's line about adultery being "beyond the pale" in Joseph.
      • Except 'beyond the pale' is not and never has been a racial slur - that's a folk entymology.

Video Games
  • C-Could it be? The — the Super Smash Bros Brawl daily site updates!! Oh! Masahiro Sakurai, the game's master of ceremonies, writes in a heartwarming, dramatic, mildly awkward style, clearly dragged from another language — rumour has it that it might be the fault of the localisers. Could that be...ambiguity? And then there's lots! Of! Strange punctuation? And! Onomatopoeia! Whaaaaaaaaaah!! (laughs)
  • It seems customary for most BioWare games to have a Heroic Sociopath on the protagonist's team.
    • Teenage girls who have a tendency to be thieves/technical experts. (Imoen, Mission, Tali, Wild Flower...)
      • These apply even when Bioware adapt other franchises, as is the case with Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Heroic Sociopath? Shadow, for starters, and also two other playable characters, Eggman, who is at points mandatory, and secret character Omega. Thieving, technical expert teenager? Rouge the Bat. It's important to note that these characters are like this in Sega's offerings, too, but that their roles are either unusually flattering (Shadow, Eggman), or unusually prominent (Rouge, Omega) in Chronicles.
  • Character designs by Tetsuya Nomura's character designs tend to overlap both in personality types and clothing style. Expect lots of...
    • A: perky young boys/men with spiky hair.
    • B: Silver or blue haired men with ANGST!
    • C: Chipper and generally positive female archetypes.
    • Lots of belts and zippers too!
  • Hideo Kojima would like to remove that ugly Fourth Wall or at least paint it a more interesting color.
    • What is the Fourth Wall, Snake? It's clear to see that the Fourth Wall is merely a construct, a wall placed by human minds to divide us from that world of tropes. We don't like to think of life as simple, you see. That... is our punishment. To go 'forth' beyond the 'wall', one must accept yourself as a troper. Tropers like us need nothing to believe in besides please stop making me make these games please please please please please
  • Games that Tim Schafer's been at tend to transpose a standard premise onto a non-standard setting (Grim Fandango is a film noir/romance...in the South American mythological afterlife, Psychonauts is about a runaway kid attending a summer camp...for psychics). They're also full of foreshadowing, almost excessive amounts of throwaway detail and characterization, and weird. Very weird. No, more weird than that.
  • ZUN seems to have a penchant for Little Miss Badass characters who wear really frilly dresses. Oh, and Nice Hats. Lots and lots of Nice Hats.
  • Suda51 makes, for the most part, strongly character-driven games with intricate stories, about which he often doesn't bother to explain everything of. He likes to incorporate real life events into his stories, but almost always has an element of Body Snatching to them. He will always have at least one character that has blocked out a traumatic memory from his past, and an important point of character development is the character acknowledging and overcoming this event, which Suda refers to as "killing the past". His games will also have a post-modern feel to the interface, and will always show close-ups of characters, either when they're introduced, or whenever they're speaking. His games will invariably feature tons of shout-outs to movies, and include Pro Wrestling moves in at least one character's arsenal.
  • Kinoko Nasu has a natural gift for writing believable characters whom you either want to hug or Love To Hate. The former especially concerns his female characters, each of whom is a one-of-a-kind mixture of genuine personality, Fetish Fuel (or Moe Moe, depending on who you ask), and plain good Badass. Thematically, his plots often revolve humans' relationship with Mother Earth and feature Bittersweet Endings (at best). And he has an Eye Fetish.
  • People Can Fly, the developers of Painkiller, have a knack for games with massive numbers of enemies on-screen at once, fun, catharthic gunplay in unsettling, creepy environments, and huge, epic fights against massive boss monsters. Even after the company was absorbed by Epic Games, many players felt that the extra content the team cooked up for the PC version of Gears Of War was the single best part of the entire game.

Web Comics

Western Animation

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Sliding Scale Of Social Satisfaction
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