Thirty-Eight Common Mistakes in Writing Fiction

1. Don’t make excuses for not writing. Pick a time and place and write. Writing is the only way to learn to write.

2. Do not consider yourself too smart, or else you will learn nothing. Every author can still learn something, and as an author, you can learn something from everyone.

3. Don’t show off when you write. The purpose of writing is to communicate to others. Showing off usually leaves the reader baffled, so they will put your book aside and move on to one that communicates better.

4. Do not neglect your schoolwork or other responsibilities to make time for writing. Everything has its place and time.

5. Don’t expect miracles. Good writing takes a long time to develop. There is a lot to learn and it is difficult to learn it, but there is a lot of fun to be had along the way—so enjoy it at a leisurely pace. Have patience, plod along the best you can, and in time you will become a good writer.

6. Never start a story with stand-still description. The opening of a story must be gripping, exciting, interesting, something that will tease a reader’s curiosity, her senses, her emotions. Start with action, not inaction.

7. Do not overly describe for the sake of making your language sound pretty. Communicate what you need to in the least amount of words, and then move on.

8. Never! Never! Never use real people in your story. You can base a character on a real person, but real people don’t make good fiction characters. You can start with a real person, but you’ll find that you must add and subtract in order to make her or him a workable character of fiction.

9. Don’t make your main character a complete wimp. Give her or him some good qualities. It is the good qualities that will give them some power and energy. Good fiction characters are fighters. They may start out as wimps, but they must learn to take control of their own lives.

10. Don’t make your villains totally evil. Find some way to give them a characteristic that the reader can like or sympathize with. That way they will be far more interesting. Find some logical reason why they believe what they believe. That will make them more of a tragic figure instead of evil.

11. Don’t avoid trouble for your character. That is what makes good fiction: the character, in trouble, struggling to succeed.

12. Don’t have things happen for no reason. The best manuscripts use everything mentioned in the story someplace else in the story.

13. If something happens in your story, there must be a reaction to it. If not, the reader will be asking questions when they’re supposed to be enjoying your story.

14. Be consistent with viewpoint. Who is telling the story? Never let it be forgotten to the reader just who is telling the story.

15. Don’t lecture your reader. If you are, then you’re either bragging, being overly descriptive, or giving too much exposition (the information behind the story).

16. Don’t let your character’s lecture either. Have them say what they need to say and get on with it. If you are in touch with your character’s feelings, then you will know what they will say and not say.

17. Become the characters you write about. Don’t just represent them. Try to become who they are. Think of them as separate from your own mind. The more real you make your characters, the more real they will seem to the reader.

18. Don’t let your characters talk too much. Let them say only what is needed for the story or the development of the character or scene.

19. Make sure the characters speak like real people talk.

20. If you have a foreign character that speaks with an accent, do not try to spell out the accented differences. Capture the sentence structure, speech mannerisms, and phrases.

21. Include in your descriptions and narrative the senses other than sight whenever you can. If you walk into the Food Court of a mall, what will you smell? You also have the senses of sound, touch, and taste. Use them.

22. Don’t be afraid to use “said.” Just don’t overuse that tag. Limit the number and kinds of tags—and alternate them. Stay away from tags that have been overused and come off “corny.” Tags like “Billy exclaimed”, or “cried Sally.”

23. Don’t assume you know something for your story. Look it up. If you’re writing an historical story that takes place on the Tower Bridge in 1870s London, make sure it was built by then (it wasn’t). The Internet makes that all too easy now.

24. Always observe what is going on around you in real life. Those are the things that find their way into fiction.

25. Structure your scenes with things you know are going to happen. Plan out the scene in as much detail as possible before you write it.

26. Make sure your disasters have something to do with the story you’re trying to tell. Nothing should be put into a story unless it advances the plot or understanding of the character. Every scene must advance something, or else—cut it.

27. Let your characters think and make logical mistakes. These become obstacles on the way to reaching a successful goal and help to make your story more interesting.

28. Get to the point and stick to it. If you pad your story with unnecessary plot elements, that is exactly how it will read. Try to stick to what advances the story and the characters. Ask yourself, “Is that chapter really necessary?”

29. Don’t worry about being too obvious. You run the risk of not being understood if you are too vague. In defining characters, stating their goals, and plot development, the more obvious the better.

30. Be critical of your writing in a helpful way. Do not “over pick” yourself to death. If you are after perfection, you will never achieve it. Just do your best. Learn to recognize what needs to be changed in your writing and what is good about it.

31. Don’t worry about what other people will think of you once they know what you’ve written.

32. Do not count praise from family, relatives, or friends as signs that your writing is good. They know you and love you—and don’t want to hurt your feelings, so they will tell you good things whether they believe it or not. They make the worst critics because they really don’t know what is good or bad about fiction. Find someone who will tell it like it is. That is literary gold.

33. Don’t be afraid of pouring your emotions into your story. Let it all hang out. If you’ve overdone it—guess what: that’s what editing is all about.

34. Do not ignore professional advice. If you are lucky enough to get help from a professional writer, don’t ignore what they tell you about your story. If you disagree at first, think about it for a long time. In the end you may see where the professional is correct.

35. Don’t try to write a novel about one idea. It is impossible. Every novel, no matter how short, has smaller subplots that are related to the main plot. Once you have subplots, you will find it easier to come up with enough “literary stuff” to make a complete novel.

36. Don’t be too anxious to finish your story once most of it is written. You will run the risk of ending it too soon, which will make the story fall flat. Finish it out to its logical conclusion and take as long as it takes.

37. Don’t give up. If you get stuck, put your work aside and go on to something else. Letting weeks or months go by with a “stuck” story will make you see it with different eyes, and what was not obvious to you, may become so once you let the writing sit and “cool off.”

38. When writing, don’t pick the first plot or scene solution that comes to mind. Most of the time the first thing you think up is the most common thing that anyone would expect. Your scenes should have the element of “logical surprise”: a solution that is logical, yet unexpected. Think of several solutions and go for the most unlikely—and make it work. Your story will be better off for it.