Top Mistakes Authors Make, Pt. 1 - Fiction

top mistakes fiction writers make in their novel manuscripts

Fiction writers, these are the biggest mistakes I see authors making in their novels. As a book editor, I’ve worked with hundreds of authors at all stages of their careers, and across the spectrum of self-publishing on Amazon all the way to pitching agents and contracting with the big 5. The mistakes I’m about to share don’t seem to discriminate based on experience or style of publishing; they’re simply items that many fiction writers struggle with.

I’m not even going to speak about punctuation, dialogue, grammar and all that fun stuff… a whole separate post to come for that.

Don’t worry–we’re all always improving as writers and there’s nothing to be ashamed of if you fall into any of the traps I list below.

(This is what editors like me are here for, after all! *wink* If you need an editor, let’s talk.)

1. Telling instead of showing

This one sounds a little cliche if you’ve ever been in a writing workshop because it’s said time and time again, but honestly, we say it so much for a reason! Telling instead of showing is still absolutely one of the biggest issues I see in novels.

Telling instead of showing is essentially when the author is summarizing or describing something that happened, and through this, prescribing how the reader should think or feel. Telling can also cause prose to sound bland and uninteresting. Showing, on the other hand, allows the reader to experience what’s happening through action, dialogue, and beautiful, sensory description. Some “telling” is okay, but we should aim for a balance of mostly showing with occasional, decisive and powerful moments of telling.

Here’s a very simple example:

Telling: “She felt anxious as she walked in the door.”

Showing: “She felt her lungs constrict as the door grew closer, unable to pull in a full breath, and her hands instinctively started twisting around one another, trying to anchor her through something tactile.”

Whereas the first sentence tells the reader how a character feels, the second offers them a sensory description that leads them to this conclusion, while enriching the layers of the scene.

2. Overdescription

When I read a book and notice that the plot is interesting and well developed but somehow the prose feels boring, or the pacing is too slow, I often uncover some overdescription. Overdescribing is when an author narrates every action in a scene, instead of selecting key actions to describe, interspersed with dialogue and thought. Ask yourself, author, what is truly important for the reader to see, and what can be implied?

Here is a quick example:

“He walks to the shelf and picks up a book. He opens the book and begins to read. As he turns a few pages, his face turns inquisitive, like he’s found what he’s looking for, so he walks back to the center of the room to the table and places the open book there as he beckons everyone over to look. As they each bend their heads inwards, he points to the page.”

Almost every action in this description is unnecessary: they don’t add to the meaning of the scene and they slow down the pacing. If I saw this in a manuscript, I’d suggest:

“He crosses the room to the book shelf, finding what he’s looking for after a few moments. Placing the open book on the table for all to see, he says, ‘here–this is it!’”

The reader can easily assume all of the actions in between. Every piece of your prose should feel as intentional as if it’s poetry. Trust your reader to fill in the rest.

3. POV and Head-hopping

Of all the mistakes I’m sharing with you, head-hopping point of view has got to be the most common and troublesome mistake I encounter. Point of view, in general, can be so contentious, that I’m going to make another post exclusively about how to use point of view correctly.

Most authors, even if they don’t know the terms, naturally write in third-person limited, or third-person with one deep character point of view. This means that while narration happens from the outside “he did this, she said that,” we have full access to one specific character’s thoughts, feelings, and inner world. We spend the book with that person.

Then, an author wants to put in some information that the character doesn’t have, or wants an easy way to convey someone else’s feelings and thoughts so they “head hop”--meaning they dive into someone else’s mind for just a moment to reveal that information and then move back to their limited viewpoint.

This doesn’t work: it’s messy and confusing and breaks up the flow of the book.

It’s important to figure out what point of view you want to write in from the beginning and understand that POV’s limitations. Third person limited is fabulous; just remember that if you need to provide info the character doesn’t have, the character we’re spending time with needs to learn about it through their own perception, experiences, interactions or dialogue with other characters, not by hopping into someone else’s mind.

4. World Building and Info Dumping

If you’re writing science fiction, fantasy, or any other novel where the world we’re in is different from the world of the reader, there will inevitably be some world building required for your reader to understand and become invested in the story.

Authors go one of two ways with world building.

One way is that they don’t offer much in the way of world building at all and just move forward with the plot. This creates confusion for the reader, or, because they don’t understand the “rules” of the world, so to speak, the plot points seem random–they don’t have as much impact as they could if the reader understood the implications.

The second way, and the one I see often, is that they info dump large amounts of world building information at once, not integrating it well into the book’s present narrative and plot. Authors, you should absolutely be doing all of this world building info dumping, but as a SEPARATE EXERCISE outside of your book. This way, you know all the information and can then splice it into the book intelligently, where needed, instead of dumping everything. There are a lot of ways to do this well, and I’ll make another post all about world building soon.

Alright, that’s it! As a book editor, those are my hot takes on the top mistakes novelists are making in their book manuscripts. Let me know what questions you have, stick around for the posts to come, and if you need an editor to help you tackle these items in your own manuscript, get in touch with me!