What embarrassing mistakes did you make as a writer?

[daeygurart]

18 years old. Finished writing a 55,000 word novel. I was so far up my ass with hubris that I sent it to 8 different agents. It sucked so much XD. Sometimes I still cringe looking at it, and think "Why did I do that?"

[Lensing]

My biggest mistakes were things I didn´t do and not listening to my gut feeling.

I don´t think you made a mistake sending it to 8 different agents, you did the
right thing

[daeygurart]

Thank you :)) I'm still trying to pursue my dream of being a writer. I guess after I got those rejections I kinda got really bad writer's block.

Also, 100% agree.

[Lensing]

Pursue your dream of being a writer?
Do it

I recommend reading 2 books, if you haven´t already.
They both help a lot to get the right mindset to become
a pro. They are both great, Atomic habits can be seen
as general life advice. The war of art is written by a professional
writer and all the advice in the book is straight forward and great.
It makes you avoid a lot of mistakes and focus on being a pro.

[daeygurart]

I'll look those up! Thank you! I'm currently reading through my old draft. I remember ripping out some pages in frustration.

[Eveeka]

As a teenager, I tend to write toxic romantic relationships thinking they were healthy XD
A mistake I can't forgive myself until this day XD

[Vikar]

Ah! I have something related to this (or maybe not)

Actually, it's my first time writing a novel so it's hard to know our reader's point of view. Like to give details or not/ or should I explain this or not / will the readers be able to imagine this plot / and whatnot. As a writer I already produced a detail movie in my mind but how much put up for readers is difficult.

And then someone said to me - "It's like you're not writing a novel but creating a world"
I belatedly realize why he said that. It's because I use lot of logic and detail, and tend to connect everything together, even though my novel is fictional.

I still don't know if it was a compliment or

[daeygurart]

It is a compliment! Some of the best novels have expansive histories and lore. I have so much lore in my novels that I have to break it into series and trilogies.

[daeygurart]

Oof been there done that

[DiegoPalacios]

Many big creators faced multiple rejections, what you can do is to learn from said rejections and learn what can be done better.

about embarrassing mistakes i did......well, as a kid and a teen i often wrote myself into a corner, absolutely zero research or failed to make coherent plots , the latter wasn't so bad when i made comedies but when i tried something a bit more serious, it caused lots of trouble.

It's a relief that the things i wrote when i was younger weren't uploaded online
if i find some i still look at them with nostalgia, they were part of the learning process and had fun making them.

[ButterflyEmpress]

Writing my main characters, who you're supposed to root for, as horribly mean.

The early drafts of my 1st web comic, the lead was an angry tsundere, and I hated tsundere characters. I almost made the same mistake in my reboot, by having her 1st introduction as unreasonably mean to strangers, especially when she never behaves that way in the rest of the story. Also looking at some of my childhood stories some characters were just plain rude to their friends and it was completely unintentional.

It's a weird bad habit I have for some reason. I guess it was an attempt at comedy or drama

[BOMB]

I wrote this story once where evil dolls came to life, and they were kidnapping people in the toy section of a store.

I'm dyslexic. I believe I have a good grasp and understanding of words, but spelling them can be a challenge because

1. I tend to spell things the way they sound

And

1. I can, at times, overlook misspelled words because I literally can't see them.

The situation was basically that I had written the word doll about a hundred times, but my auto-correct changed the word to ball. Even after rereading my work about a thousand times, I couldn't see the mistake. So I ended up posting the story, and no more than two days later, I had a random person rip into me for being stupid enough to mistake "ball" for "doll."

From then on, I made an effort to use more technical ways of checking my writing. I run it through two grammatical apps, one of which is Grammarly. And I use an Ereader so I can listen to my writing being read by someone other than myself. These two check systems have helped me to improve dramatically, but I never would have used them had that one person not ripped into me for that mistake.

However, I will never re-release that particular story because it has become a sort of dark time marker in the history of my writing, and as paranoid as it may be, part of me can't help but feel that person will come back to obliterate my self-esteem again lol

[MissPaige36]

I used to be a wattpad writer (still am AHAHA) and when I first began writing on an old account, I was one of those really cringe writers who’d post a million author announcements just ranting about literally nothing and never actual chapters. Also the chapters themselves were usually me interrupting the flow to make a joke in parentheses. Now if that wasn’t bad by itself, my poor readers eventually called me out on my behavior and I quit writing… well until now at least. Um, promise I don’t do it anymore T-T

[TheLemmaLlama]

I wasn't entirely sure so I read over some of my old work until I hit something that made me cringe particularly hard:

IT'S SO CLUNKY

(Also, the narrator Aerith was a character I only made into the protagonist because I was somehow stuck with the preconceived notion that the protagonist of a fantasy adventure has to be a speedy/dexterous fighter with a spunky, rebellious personality I probably would've wrote something less cringe if I instead centered a character I actually vibed with; like Plus, the chill, spacey oddball mighty glacier XD)

My biggest mistakes were things I didn´t do and not listening to my gut feeling.

I don´t think you made a mistake sending it to 8 different agents, you did theright thing

It's not a mistake, but it does feel embarrassing At least you never feel embarrassed by things you didn't do (And that's why we're afraid to do things )