What are three common mistakes to avoid in writing?

Q&A With Shay Each Sunday

Over a year ago I ran a blog on top writing advice for beginning authors and another a few months after that on five common mistakes to avoid in writing. Both consist of some overlap on key writing rules, advice, and techniques to keep in mind, especially when first starting out. The five common mistakes I listed in that last blog were:

• Show don’t tell

• Avoid adverbs

• No one-dimensional characters

• No switching between tense or point of view

• Avoid purple prose

I’ll continue to expand in this blog post with three MORE mistakes to avoid, especially those that I continually see coming up in my editing work or otherwise (not to mention catching myself being an offender sometimes).

Q: What are three (more) common mistakes to avoid in writing, particularly the editing process?

A:

1. Rushing a project to completion too early. A lot of times writers will think they’re ready to publish because they’re eager to get their work out into the world, which is totally understandable, when really what they have looks like a first draft. Or simply could use more attention. Be patient and take the time to comb through your story thoroughly. Multiple edits and beta reads may be necessary. Many many self-edits before and after professional edits are also inevitable. There is a lot to think about, and sitting on thoughts or ideas for a bit while letting your manuscript “rest” can be very helpful. I tend to be a writer who writes many drafts. I have a lot of trouble calling something finished, and I might be too far on the other side (not rushing to publish at all) with perfectionism because no story is ever going to appeal to absolutely everybody. But take the time to make sure you at least have the writing as clean as it can be, all the consistencies in plot, characters, and world building refined, and so on. If you’re like me and you tinker forever then maybe setting deadlines could be helpful because the other side of this is that writing is subjective and cannot ever be perfect. So, don’t rush but make sure you get your story into the world at some point, too!

2. Avoid being repetitive. I feel like we’re all more repetitive in early drafts and it’s something we have to keep an eye out for and revise once the revision process has begun. Often I’ll see a writer making a point in their story and hammering that point in by saying it multiple times in slightly different ways or dedicating more scenes to an idea or plot point that could be done in fewer. You have to trust that your reader will understand and not go on and on so as to feel repetitive. Repetition avoidance can also go for describing something in the same way every time. For example you might have a character and you refer to the color of their eyes as olive. Don’t continue to say “olive eyes” every. single. time that character appears. (This example comes directly from my first work in progress by the way.) Vary your descriptions and language. Avoid repetition even of simple narrative words within sentences. Sometimes it can feel like there’s no other way to get the point across and the repetition is necessary, and on occasion that is the case, but you can pretty much always avoid using the same word in the same couple sentences. I always suggest replacing words when I edit if I see them come up within the same paragraph or even few paragraphs depending on the word and how many other ways there are to say it. For example: They arrived at the beach just after 10 p.m. The beach was dark tonight.

   You could use plenty of other words rather than saying beach twice in neighboring sentences here. Also, these sentences are boring and elementary and I’d suggest rewriting them altogether (I mean “10 p.m.” and “night” are one in the same—there’s some more repetition for ya), but you get my gist.

3. Take the time to learn how to format correctly as much as you can from writing in dialogue, scene breaks, page breaks, line spacing, etc. If it’s all left to the editor to fix this for you, you’re missing out on learning more about the field you’re in, plus you’ll feel better knowing you have something polished and tidy rather than a work that needs to be entirely reformatted with periods in the wrong place, no quotations or line breaks where they should be, and so on. Plus, you probably want to have your work as close to finished and professional as possible on your own so you don’t have to rely on others for the basics. Writing a bunch of lines of dialogue all in one sentence and not ever using indentations for paragraphs is a lot of unnecessary tasks to put on your editor when their focus could be on other parts of your story. I understand we all have our Achilles’ heel(s) with the English language—and of course with technology; there are many rules after all, but we can get the basics down with a little effort.

What do you think are some of the other most important writing rules or parts of the editing process?