77 Common Mistakes New Writers Make
Here's the full list of common mistakes:
1. Having central characters with too similar of names.
2. Having characters waste time using the bathroom or walking around.
3. Not having characters with a clear goal or need.
4. Not having a story that has sufficient stakes.
5. Not having a plot that progressively escalates in stakes.
6. Having a plot that wanders--that has no beginning, middle, or end.
7. Not having a central theme in your story.
8. Starting the story too early.
9. Starting the story too late.
10. Writing what everyone else is writing.
11. Not writing to market.
12. No uniqueness in your writing style.
13. Not killing your darlings.
14. Going on random tangents.
15. Not adding enough background flavor intertwined with story.
16. Info dumping.
17. Forcing characters to take flimsy action to advance plot, rather than act truthfully to their character.
18. Not diversifying your characters in their voices or personalities.
19. Making all your male characters have two sons and three dogs.
20. Not creating enough emotional impact.
21. Using too many filtering words like "thought" or "feel."
22. Getting lost in character blocking.
23. Not building your world up enough.
24. Focusing too much on world building and not enough on story.
25. Generic magic systems.
26. Thinking magic system are that important.
27. Worrying a ton about characters names.
28. Worrying a ton about place names.
29. Making characters defined solely by their disability(s).
30. Making characters defined solely by their ability(s).
31. Making characters defined solely by their race.
32. Making characters defined solely by their gender.
33. Making characters that exist only to solve (white) people's problems.
34. Making all characters hyper attractive.
35. Aligning a character's attractiveness with their morality.
36. Forcing all male characters to be hyper masculine,
37. Forcing all female characters to be tomboyish.
38. Forcing all female characters to be hyper feminine.
39. Being weirdly obsessed and pervy with descriptions of female anatomy.
40. Opening with a dream.
41. Opening with someone waking up.
42. Opening with landscape description.
43. Opening with description of a character.
44. Opening without any action.
45. Using a mirror to describe a character.
46. Naming a character after yourself.
47. Basing a character after yourself in order to wish fulfill.
48. Writing characters that have no flaws.
49. Writing villains that are only flawed.
50. Introducing too many characters too quickly.
51. Including characters that have redundant roles.
52. Describing everybody that's not white with weird food-related metaphors and similes.
53. Relying on other author's writing styles.
54. Relying on too many adjectives and adverbs, rather than strong verbs.
55. Writing exclusively in cliches.
56. Not knowing the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.
57. Not knowing how to use semicolons.
58. Misspelling apart versus a part
59. Not diversifying your sentence structures.
60. Not diversifying your sentence lengths.
61. Not diversifying your dialogue structure.
62. Including characters' too much instead of pronouns.
63. Writing a useless sentence.
64. Writing a novel when you should practice with short stories.
65. Wasting time writing short stories when you want to write a novel.
66. Writing dialogue that has no meaning.
67. Writing prose that's too ornate.
68. Writing prose that's too minimalist.
69. Writing what you don't know.
70. Writing only what you know.
71. Outlining your story when you should be a gardener.
72. Winging your story when you should be an architect.
73. Working too hard too fast.
74. Not working hard enough.
75. Failing to learn basic grammar.
76. Having not read a book in the last five years.
77. Mindlessly following the banal and generic advice of random people on the internet who could not possibly teach you how to write well in a ten minute video so they instead rely on the insecurities of new writers to fuel their platform.
Here's the only three true mistakes you're making:
1. Not reading.
2. Not writing.
3. Not thinking critically about your writing or reading.
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