New writer mistakes I've seen

RobertBMarks 2022-08-11 15:17:49 UTC #1

I've read a lot of work by new writers since I started posting here, and I've noticed some of the same mistakes crop up again and again. So, I thought it might be helpful to provide a quick list, and hopefully this will help some new writers steer clear of them...

Not giving the narrative room to breathe. I think I've seen this the most often - the writer hits the ground at a sprint, racing through plot points at breakneck speed. The problem with this approach is that nothing has a chance to register on the reader, and thus nothing has any impact. In a worst-case scenario, one writer killed off the protagonist's parents within 1,500 words of the story starting (about six pages double-spaced or three pages single-spaced), without ever developing them as characters first (in this case, my estimate was that this plot point should have happened around 10,000 words in). Now, you generally want to have your inciting incident as early as possible, and then move without delay to the protagonists' reaction to that incident, but you also want the reader to register what is happening, and they can't do that if you short-change the setup.
Forgetting to show or tell. I've seen this a couple of times, and it tends to show up alongside item #1 - the writer composes a bunch of dialogue, but forgets to add description around that dialogue. The end result is functionally a script, without any development of the setting or body language of the characters. It's important to remember that you're not writing a script - you're writing a novel. The reader will only be able to imagine what you give them to imagine, and character dialogue is not nearly enough.
Characters not acting like human beings. This shows up a lot with writers who are strongly influenced by anime, particularly romantic or harem comedy, where the character interactions are exaggerated for comic effect. But even in Japan, people don't act like that in real life (Japan, in fact, is an extremely reserved society, where public displays of affection can be scandalous - and those character interactions are funny in part because they would be so scandalous in real life). The worst-case I saw was so vile that I'm not even going to describe it here (it was the first and only time leaving feedback in the Discord that I found myself telling the author that I hoped he stopped writing his story), but the second worst-case involved a schoolgirl flirting by shoving the protagonist's face into her breasts. Readers are people, and they know that people don't act that way. If your characters aren't acting like actual human beings, the disconnect will drag the reader out of the narrative.
Last but not least, not getting into the character's head when the author has a chance. This is a function of "show, don't tell," but it is also worth noting on its own. The novel has the ability to do something that almost no other media does - it can put a reader right inside a character's head and show them their thought process. This is why the 3rd person character POV or 1st person narrative is so powerful - we can witness the character's inner conflict and/or journey play out in front of us in a very personal way. If you don't do that when you have the chance, you're missing an opportunity to elevate your narrative.

And, that covers what comes to mind right now...

Luminosophy 2022-08-11 17:24:53 UTC #2

My favourite go-to example for this is action related. When you have a protagonist who is taking on a massive gang of bad guys and even though the protag is just absolutely face rolling the gang with little to no effort, the gang never has any sense of life preservation or comraderie. It's very weird that they never seem to care that their friends/ family are going down horrifically right in front of them, and it also never registers for them that they're outmatched, even down to the last man when numbers are no longer on their side. Granted this is both a hollywood and anime problem.

ratscout 2022-08-11 19:37:56 UTC #3

As someone who has done a lot of read-for-reads on this site in the past, I would agree that the more prevalent advice I was giving people was:
1. Slow down! Let the characters and stories breathe before you start throwing them into wild situations!
and
2. use descriptions of the environment to tell us about the characters. I was noticing that a lot of the environmental descriptions were rather short, which isn't always bad, but a bit more detail is always nice.

I do think some of this is done on purpose as writing for Tapas encourages this type of storytelling since you only 15,000 characters for each episode and Tapas markets itself as "small story bites." or something like that. It's not exactly great if you want to tell an in-depth story a lot of the time.

I do think a lot of authors on here write their stories more in the style of a comic book/TV show, which is not why people come to books, too.

Ordinaryaverageguy 2022-08-12 02:51:03 UTC #4

I decided to turn a series of VA scripts into a short story so I really do have a pile of dialog and almost nothing else. Sometimes, it's just a discouraging slog to edit it and flesh it all out. It's not been as much fun as writing with nothing but white space in front of me.

TheLemmaLlama 2022-08-12 03:04:02 UTC #5

Ah yes, describing setting/body language etc is hard :'D This is why I'll always be a comic writer

RobertBMarks 2022-08-12 03:33:45 UTC #6

You have my sympathy, sir.

DasIstWunderblyat 2022-08-12 03:36:38 UTC #7

Character not acting like human beings

Jokes on you they aren't LOL

RobertBMarks 2022-08-12 03:43:03 UTC #8

That's absolutely true. They are not - they are constructs we create for the purpose of telling the story. If we do the job right, they come alive and surprise us.

However, for the reader to buy into our fantasy, they must appear to be human beings, and have the form and aspect of human beings. If we fail there, the reader will walk away from our fiction and find the work of somebody who succeeds.

DasIstWunderblyat 2022-08-12 03:53:13 UTC #9

I don't expect you to answer seriously (that was a joke), but yeah. The characters are probably aliens pretending to be human. Hell, check if the writer is an actual human

Though it kind of put me off when sapient non-human creatures behaves exactly like modern humans do, especially those non-humanoid and/or should not have any human influence in their civilization.

RobertBMarks 2022-08-12 03:55:13 UTC #10

In fairness, I am talking about characters who are supposed to be human. You are absolutely right about getting it wrong going in the other direction.

YS_og 2022-08-13 03:07:14 UTC #11

I have been one to fully agree with the point of not rushing things (and I still pretty much do stick to it), but MAN have I been reviewed by a lot saying my story takes too long to get going (3 chapters are spent setting things up). These were done through DM review swaps and said the story got boring after 2 chapters and no action or plot upstarts, saying they lost interest without seeing anything major going down to kick the story off.

Is it the blind leading the blind conundrum or is there something else to the issue?

IndigoShirtProd 2022-08-13 03:35:09 UTC #12

This was a worry for me when I started writing my novella. I had planned it as a short story so I knew going into it that I wasn't going to spend much time on extraneous subplot' everything is pretty self contained. I think my story is pretty well paced, but in a situation like that, where the story would be a quick read anyway, how would you keep from speeding through it, hitting plot points one after the other since there's nothing else for the story to do?

Was it a situation where plot points were introduced but not weaved together? Like point A happens followed by point B then point C but the connecting tissue isn't apparent? And did the inciting incident, or at least one of them, happen within the first 2 chapters, or did it occur later on?

YS_og 2022-08-13 03:37:21 UTC #13

It's a rather simple startup, not too much to weave as far as complexity goes. The complaint I got wasn't disjointedness but a lack of action. A lack of the big problem, a lack of the "oh wow! here we go!" kick-off.

IndigoShirtProd 2022-08-13 03:38:48 UTC #14

So I can assume the inciting incident, or the thing that kicks off the plot, happened a little later in the story?

YS_og 2022-08-13 03:42:10 UTC #15

Right, 4th and 5th chapter got that going. Was told that's too long, needs to be Chapter 1 or 2.

Now again these were DM review swaps. The discord I belong to has a majority of members who are in agreement with OP and so far I am yet to really change anything but those comments do linger

RobertBMarks 2022-08-13 03:45:05 UTC #16

That sounds like that's your problem. What's generally a good idea is to have your inciting incident in the prologue or first chapter, and then develop your characters around their reactions to it.

So, for example, in Re:Apotheosis, there's a dual inciting incident in the prologue and first chapter, and then the next seven are character development leading to the first major confrontation (which starts in chapter 9). So, there's a lot of character moments, but they are happening in the shadow of the inciting incident, if that makes sense.

YS_og 2022-08-13 03:58:25 UTC #17

There is a major incident but it's not involving the MC just yet as it would make no sense to have them involved without any clue as to how or why they get there. So. of course, there are initial reactions and developments that draw the MC to the issue. There is no action, though. That's what I am trying to point out. There are no fight scenes or chaos blasting directly through MC's world right off the bat.

RobertBMarks 2022-08-13 04:05:35 UTC #18

I fear I may not have explained it well. It's not the lack of action that would be the problem - it's the lack of conflict (and conflict is nothing more than something standing in the way of the protagonist - it doesn't have to involve an action sequence). The inciting incident is what starts the main conflict by forcing the protagonist to react. So, you have to have an interaction as soon as possible. And, this interaction can literally be the MC receiving a text about it on his phone, scowling, and then ignoring it - but the ball has been set in motion, and tension has been created in the reader's mind as to how this reaction by the MC will cause things to play out.

Does that make more sense?

YS_og 2022-08-13 04:12:15 UTC #19

You did, and I have that. I don't have action or anything that serves as an action genre's "hook"(?) was the critique I often received. I think I wasn't clear enough perhaps. Drama buildup with dialogue and characters headed toward conflict is boring in the eyes of action genre readers perhaps?

Again, I was told I need to kick things off with a bang sooner. I feel it's too much like a Hollywood B movie to just jump in guns blazing left and right just because. But perhaps I was wrong? That was what I was trying to convey initially.

RobertBMarks 2022-08-13 04:15:39 UTC #20

Okay, I think I see.

I've subscribed to your story, and if I have time this weekend I'll take a closer look and see what I can make of it. No promises, though.