Five Rookie Writing Mistakes (I Still Sometimes Make)
I am not a good bowler. I know, that’s not where you saw this post going. Stick with me.
I enjoy bowling occasionally, and I am occasionally great at it. Which is just a fancy way of saying that sometimes I get lucky. In any given game, I am likely to knock down all the pins in one throw about twice. If I am very lucky, one of those times I will manage to do it on the first throw of a frame, so it will actually count as a strike.
I think my highest score ever is probably about 112. I am certain it’s below 120.
If I were to devote every waking hour to bowling, spend thousands on only the best equipment, and never make another mistake as long as I lived, the best score I could ever achieve would allow me to tie with every other great bowler who’s ever managed a perfect game. You can’t score higher than 300 in bowling. It’s not possible. The rules don’t allow it. In fact, given the way ball manufacturing technology and oil patterns have helped bowlers perfect their play, you might be able to make an argument that the best bowlers alive today are actually worse at bowling than the best bowlers alive 100 years ago. I’m not making that argument, but someone maybe could.
My point though, is that no matter how good you get at bowling, there’s always a cap after which, even if you are getting better, you can’t really measure it.
Writing is very different, and also very similar. Unlike bowling, there’s no cap to how good a writer you can be; however, because “good writing” is based almost entirely on subjective criteria, there’s no clear or obvious way to measure how good a writer you are.
All you can do is identify mistakes and avoid them in the future. So let’s look at five rookie mistakes (that I still sometimes make).
Telling instead of “showing”
One of the most famous mantras that writers repeat to other writers as advice is “show don’t tell.” It’s not bad advice at all, but it can feel a little unclear when you’re a new writer and you aren’t totally sure how to “show” something in a book that doesn’t have illustrations. Perhaps a more clear way to explain this idea is “describe, don’t state.”
“Susan felt happy.”
That is a statement. Sure, I can imagine what a happy woman looks like, but that doesn’t help me imagine the unique ways in which Susan experiences happiness.
“A quick snort of laughter escaped as a smile spread across Susan’s face.”
That’s a description. Instead of stating the way she feels, I gave bits of evidence that help the reader “see” what Susan is doing, and thus understand how she is feeling.
Over-writing
Telling is bad, but if you veer too far the other way, you will still have a problem. You want to engage your reader’s mind, but our brains filter out details all the time. Instead of describing every possible detail in an attempt to force the reader to picture the exact mental image you have, only provide enough detail to ensure what they are imagining is accurate enough to move on with the story.
“David stretched his arms over his head and yawned, scratching his two-day-old stubble with fingernails that had recently been trimmed. His sky-blue shirt strained over the bulk of his gut. His pajama pants were faded from years of wearing, washing, and wearing again. He sat up slowly and blinked sleep from his eyes, stretching his arms again, but this time across his chest. He slid his legs out from the edge of the covers and placed his feet on the floor—first the left, then the right—before rolling his ankles around in their sockets to stretch them too, this time in the opposite order—right then left.”
With a description like that, a reader can’t help but mentally shout GET ON WITH IT! Don’t write as though providing step-by-step instructions for a stop-motion film.
“David stretched and yawned, scratching his stubble with trimmed fingernails. His clothing strained across his gut as he rose from bed and blinked sleep from his eyes.”
See how much better that feels to read? When writing, your job is to draw your readers’ attention to what is important, which also means filtering out everything that is not. Trust your reader to make inferences; no one is going to be confused about how David got out of bed because you didn’t specify that his feet touched the floor.
Purple Prose
A kissin’-cousin of over-writing, purple prose goes beyond just providing too much detail. Purple prose is what happens when you get a new Thesaurus with more torque than you can actually handle but you drive it off the lot anyway. If the writing itself becomes a distraction from the story the writing is telling, you have a problem.
Lady Fenrick magnanimously extended her porcelain hand and elegant fingers, deigning to grace the impoverished and illiberal proletariat with a diaphanous gesticulation that was somehow grandiose despite its subtleties.
Knowledge is understanding the definition of all those words. Wisdom is not clumping them into one bloated sentence. No one reads to feel impressed by how many words you know, so make sure you don’t write with that goal in mind.
Lady Fenrick waved gracefully at the peasants—a gesture she felt was generous beyond what such wretches deserved.
By cutting the purple prose, I made the sentence easier to navigate which in turn more clearly highlighted Lady Fenrick’s pride and disdain for lower classes.
Character coddling
You spend a lot of time developing your characters. Most of the time they take on a sort of life of their own, developing personality quirks you never really intended them to have. It’s natural to have a kind of affection for these “people” you created. Even so, you can’t let them off the hook. A good story is one where the tension and drama are real, and that can’t happen when you’re protecting your characters from harm and making sure every setback is a minor one. There’s no real way to show an example of this done well or done poorly, because it happens over the course of an entire narrative, but just make sure you are getting in there and messing up their lives.
Too Many Daves
I’m not sure if there’s a better name for this, or a more official one, but I’m referring to the awful situation where a huge cast of characters all have similar looking or sounding names. When reading a story, it’s important that your readers can quickly and easily tell any two characters apart. This gets hard to do if the names are all the same.
James turned to Jeremy and sneered. “You really thought John and I wouldn’t find out? You should have known better than to trust Jonas. Johan was in his ear from the start, countering every single one of your lies.”
Now imagine that going on for dozens or hundreds of pages. The more characters your story will weave in, the more important it is to give your reader mental “coat hooks” to hang each character’s identity on. One of the easier ways to do this is giving them significantly different names.
James turned to Quincey and sneered. “You really thought Darrel and I wouldn’t find out? You should have known better than to trust Gordon…”
Believe it or not, there’s evidence that we associate certain names and faces. When the look of a character is all in a reader’s mind, it’s that much easier to muddle their “look” if the reader is also keeping track of other characters whose on-paper identifier (i.e. their name) looks very similar.
