You know me – I love to read. I’ll read pretty much anything I can get my hands on, whether it’s good or bad. I like to pick up high-profile books that people recommend me (by the way, I seriously appreciate your suggestions, so keep them coming), as well as any stuff from amateur writers that I can get my hands on for cheap on Amazon. And when you read as much as I do, you start to notice some… things. Bad things. Terrible, no-good things. Mistakes is what I’m getting at, and not just mistakes, like a pacing issue, or a plot hole, or a trope/cliché (those are basically unavoidable by even the greatest writers), I mean errors that either should have certainly been caught and fixed by another draft, or are fundamentally embedded into the core of the book to the point where you’d need to go back to the drawing board to correct them. So what the hell, let’s dive in and explore the three worst mistakes fiction writers do! Remember – these apply ONLY to fiction, and are also in no particular order!
1. Introducing Too Many Characters Straight From The Start
One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve personally noticed I believe stems from the fact that many writers visualize their stories and characters in their heads. They see it almost as a movie or a TV show, and can clearly imagine the visuals, so to them, having a bunch of brand new characters introduced at once is nothing out of the ordinary, because movies do it all the time! The problem is, with a visual medium, you can keep track of these characters even when you don’t know their names or what they’re about. You can give them label based on appearances or behavior. Books, however, are obviously not a visual medium – they rely on your inner eye to tell the story. So unless you’re able to properly imagine a character, then you’re only going to get confused. Mark? Who the hell is Mark? That’s why good writers only introduce one or two characters at a time, allowing readers to become familiar with them before moving forward. Take, for example, the very first “Harry Potter” book – re-read that and try to take notes of exactly when each important character is properly introduced. See if you can spot how developed they are before the next major player shows up! Meanwhile, compare that to something like, say, “Five Nights at Freddy’s: The Silver Eyes” (which, according to my Kindle notes, most people didn’t even finish), and see what I’m talking about.
2. Writing Things That Are Completely Redundant
I don’t remember who said it, and Google isn’t helpful, but one of my favorite rules of fiction writing is “If something can be cut, it should be”. It’s beautiful, it’s to the point, and it is 100% correct. Books should be as short as possible, especially in today’s world of oversaturation where you rarely have a shortage of stuff to do. In all honesty, I know for a fact that most publishers aren’t going to even touch a book by a new author if it’s longer than a certain amount, since most people aren’t willing to invest that much time and effort into someone untested. And yet some novice authors feel the need to consistently pad out their plots for length, even when that is completely unnecessary. “Hmm, maybe I haven’t properly established the main character’s relationship with his wife. Let’s do a 25-page scene in which they have dinner!” No, dude, seriously, we get it, they’re in a loveless marriage, we seriously don’t need that information reinforced. We’re not idiots. But one of the absolutely dumbest examples of this mistake comes from a book that I will not name, since it’s a very, very small title I got for free, so it’d feel like bullying. One example from it involved a character, an evil senator of some sort, making arrangements with a co-conspirator in order to further their evil scheme. They discuss their whole plan at ridiculous lengths (literally all they want to do is frame someone for a murder, and yet they’re willing to go as far as to ENACT A NEW LAW specifically to frame that one particular person) in a scene that goes on for way too long, and when it mercifully ends, the senator says something along the lines of “Okay, great. I’ll call my secretary and do the arrangements”. Normally, you’d expect this to be the cue for a scene transition or a chapter end, but nope, the guy actually calls his secretary and proceeds to repeat to her the exact goddamn thing that he’d just spent pages upon pages discussing. UGH. Don’t do that. Just… Just don’t.
3. Adding Twists For The Sake of Twists
Think about it for a second – why is the “I am your father” twist from “Empire Strikes Back” still considered to be one of the best plot twists of all time, despite the fact that “character X and character Y are secretly related” has been used as a plot device literally since antiquity? Well, that is because not only was the twist shocking, but it also completely changed the dynamic between the characters and the context of the whole trilogy. That one, single line changed EVERYTHING! “Star Wars” was no longer just a simple fight between a very good good and a very bad bad. The evil tyrant that has been hunting down Luke and his friends since the start of the trilogy used to be a hero, his own father at that. Ben Kenobi, the wise old sage, is exposed as a liar and a manipulator with his own agenda. And most of all, the twist makes sense – of course Ben would lie about Luke’s father, it’s not like “Hey, I want you to come help me kill your own father and destroy everything he’s helped built” was going to be a good sales pitch! This one twist, despite being so mundane, still shocks children to this very day. It’s basically the most memorable thing about “Star Wars” as far as casual audiences are concerned! And of course, that means that everyone and their mother now wants some kind of twist in their book. As a rule of thumb, never, EVER have a plot twist just for the sake of having a plot twist – that never ends well. If you’re looking for poor examples of a plot twist that make no sense, look no further than Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, or Naseem Rakha’s “The Crying Tree”. I won’t spoil these twists for you, but they’re really bad, either failing to add anything to a story or just coming completely out of nowhere. As for examples of good twists, look no further than Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”, or Ian McEwan’s “Atonement”.