Mistakes Happen to the Best of Us (Writers)!

scissors, blood, editing

(photo: Guzmán Lozano, creative commons license)

Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of Reedsy (the service that links authors with top-quality expertise in many areas of manuscript development and publication) recently wrote a BookBub post with the enticing title, “12 Common Writing Errors Even Bestselling Authors Make.” Since I’m sure I make them all, I read it carefully.

Fayet based his list on feedback from the developmental editors, copy editors, and proofreaders Reedsy employs, and the items on it fall into three broad categories: narrative problems, creating confusion, and grammar/punctuation. The grammar/punctuation problems are the ones we’d expect, and the sources of confusion can be boiled down to point-of-view problems (sound of gnashing teeth—mine!) and when writers omit relevant information, or more likely, when they include it in draft #1, but lose it somehow in draft #12.

“Show, Don’t Tell” Again

If only someone would show me how to do that and quit telling me! Sure, we know that creating scenes and dialog makes the action of a story more meaningful for readers. Yet this SDT issue keeps coming up. In my writer’s group, “I want to see this in a scene” is practically a mantra.

At the same time, dialog that goes nowhere is deadly; scenes that don’t contribute much are a waste of energy. A pithy summary can move a story forward quickly—say, when we need to close a gap of years or introduce a new setting or character. That’s information that changes the chessboard. It has to be just as relevant and interesting as a scene. A crime novel I read recently gave a two-page information dump, on cue, each time a new character was introduced. Bad enough, but these “back stories” were hackneyed, full of predictable details. Cardboard descriptions of cardboard characters. Better to skip it.

Overdescribing and Overexplaining

Can we show too much? Yes, if we fall prey to overdescribing. No point in having a character “nod her head”; she can just nod. No point in having a character get out of his chair, walk to the window, look out, then turn and say . . . . Let him just “look out the window and say.” Labored locutions are common in first drafts, because we’re visualizing the action of a story and setting it on the page. We need to be attuned to them, though, so we delete them later. We need to trust that readers understand people don’t leave the room without getting out of their chair first (though I can imagine situations where that extra information would be needed). More about overexplaining here.

Strong Openers

Showing, not telling and avoiding over-explaining help give a story a strong opening. Elmore Leonard famously advises never to start a story with the weather. Yet a surprising number of books begin with something like “It was a bright, sunny day. Hot for May.” I yawn,  unless May is one of the characters. It isn’t weather per se, it’s the banal we need to avoid.

I tend to write a couple of opening paragraphs—like I’m warming up—before getting to the story’s action. My critique group advises me to delete them, and I do. They must have read Chekhov, who said: “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” My flaw isn’t exactly lying, it’s more forecasting the direction of a story before even I know what that will be.

Check out this opener from Mick Herron’s MI5 thriller, Slow Horses: “This is how River Cartwright slipped off the fast track and joined the slow horses”; and Deon Meyer’s post-apocalyptic adventure tale, Fever: “I want to tell you about my father’s murder. I want to tell you who killed him and why.” Starters like those make readers keep going.

Regarding Chekhov’s point about endings, we should leave it to “you, dear reader” to form a conclusion. Although I liked Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, the last twenty pages were a sort of rambling essay on the book’s meaning, as best I could figure them out.  To me, they were a turn-off and unnecessary. If I didn’t get it after reading 750 pages, I wasn’t going to.

Unbelievable! Please, no

Fayet says Reedsy editors find frequent examples of “unbelievable conflicts.” I wonder sometimes why a protagonist doesn’t just pick up the phone and clear up the whole matter. Though keeping secrets is a common source of story conflict and tension, we need to show (not tell) why doing so is important to this character in this situation. Clichéd actions are as unsatisfactory as clichéd dialog.

Thrillers and family dramas are equally prey to preposterous situations. I suspect this holds true for the romance genre, as well, judging these books by their covers. We can show all we want, but if what we’re showing is unconvincing, our millions of readers are lost.

3 thoughts on “Mistakes Happen to the Best of Us (Writers)!

  1. Great article. I confess to making many of those mistakes even after 32 years as a published author. However, I have learned to catch a ton of them myself before I send to my editor – then she catches all the rest! It seems never ending. The great thing about authors, though, is that we pop back.

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