Rookie Mistakes
And How to Avoid Them
Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life, where we have all survived Hurricane Ophelia, but some of my plant pots were knocked over. Never forget. Today’s Shelf Life is a straightforward one about mistakes that inexperienced writers commonly make in their early manuscripts and how to avoid making those. I got to thinking of this topic because over the weekend I read some books that were indie published—whether self or under a small press I’m hard-pressed to tell—and they were excellent, well written and with high production values, but this is often not the case when I try a self-published book.
Self-published books have the capacity to be just as good as—better, in fact—than a traditionally published book. I say better because a traditionally published book will always have some limit on production values according to budget whereas a self-publishing author can continue going rounds of design, copyediting, proofing, and so on till they run out of money. In other words, a talented and well-heeled author with the right connections can release a title that is better edited and produced than a traditional publishing company can.
I’ve read self- and indie-published books that are in all ways better than their trad-published peers and I’ve also read trad-published books that made me scratch my head and wonder who greenlit this manuscript. There’s nothing inherent in self-publishing that means the resulting titles are “worse” in some way than traditionally published books. However, the bar to entry for self-publishing is nil. There’s actually not one (a bar). If you have a manuscript, you can self-publish it—whether it’s good or not. Traditionally published books aren’t always great either but the trad publishing model does include a long line of people who evaluate the manuscript and make sure it’s ready for prime time before it is released to market.
Sometimes a writer finishes their manuscript and pronounces it ready for sale and slaps it up there on Amazon without any revision, editing, or review and—it shows.
The rookie mistakes I’m going to talk about today do not exist only in self-published books. They show up in a lot of first drafts that never see publication and I have also seen every one of these things in traditionally published books also. But I got to thinking about this topic because after reading some indie titles this past weekend I wondered: What are some of the things that I see in books sometimes that send up a red flag to me? The tropes and mistakes that make a published book look like an unpolished first effort.
I’ve seen all of these in manuscripts I’ve edited, too. I don’t expect to never see any of these in an unpublished manuscript undergoing editing. Editing is when you want to catch these things and root them out—before you’re on shelves for the whole world to read.
1. Exposition-Laden Start
Nothing screams “I don’t trust myself to tell this story” like beginning with multiple pages of exposition to make sure your reader doesn’t have any questions as they settle into your book.
Inexperienced or unconfident writers may have trouble judging how much information readers need to get into the story. You want the reader to have questions that you can answer later—questions that draw them in—but you also need the reader to have enough information that they don’t feel alienated or uncomfortably confused by the setting. New writers sometimes err on the side of giving more information rather than less. The result: Chapter one starts off with an infodump.
Nobody enjoys slogging through an infodump. Okay, that’s not true—for all things in this world, there’s somebody out there who likes them. Somebody out there just loves picking up a new book and wading through an encyclopedia entry–style chapter one about the setting or the main character’s backstory. But most readers do not want or need this.
If your story starts with Susan murdering her husband Bill, don’t start us off with Susan—or the narrator—giving us the whole history of Susan and Bill’s twenty-two-year marriage leading up to the murder. Start with the murder. Or even start with Susan shoveling dirt onto the still-warm corpse of her husband of twenty-two years. We don’t even need to know that Susan killed him to get invested. We just need to know that Bill is dead and Susan isn’t and for some reason she’s burying him in a shallow grave in the back yard instead of calling 911. We can get the rest as we go along.
2. The Mirror Scene
The mirror scene is like using methamphetamine: Do not do it. Not even one time. I mean, again, I’m kind of kidding. Write the mirror scene if you need to. Just make sure it’s out of the story before you publish.
The mirror scene is the scene that happens near the start of your book where the main character lets the reader know what they look like by examining themself in a mirror and relating what they see to the reader. This scene may also take the form of the character thinking deep thoughts about their physical appearance, or another character arriving to declaim to the audience about the character’s looks.
In short, any scene designed to impart your main character’s physical appearance to the reader right at the start all in one chunk—this is a sign of an inexperienced writer who is unsure how to let the audience know what the character looks like in an organic way.
First of all, the reader doesn’t really need to know that much about how the main character looks, particularly if the story is being told from their point of view (first or close third). It’s kind of immaterial, isn’t it? When you’re telling a story about something that happened to you, do you first give a full-on accounting of what you looked like at the time? How you had your hair styled, what you were wearing? Not unless it’s material to the story you’re telling.
It’s fine to drop some of those details into the text early on. Have the character pull their unruly curls into a sloppy bun or make a snarky internal comment that the world isn’t designed for very-tall people. That’s all you need—one or two physical characteristics to set characters apart from one another. You can fill in more details of your protagonist’s appearance later, in a more natural way.
3. Tense-Mixing
Pick a verb tense and stick with it. Your main choices are past tense and present tense. Can you tell a story in future tense? Sure. But that’s probably not what anyone is worried about.
The verb tense you choose should be the main verb tense used for all events in the story that are happening in the present time, the main storyline. Whether you’ve chosen present tense or past tense, you should be consistent. The verb tense should change only when shifting the narrative to a different point in time—for instance when a character in the present is speaking about the future, or recalling past events, that character may speak in future or past tense. But the verb tense of the narrative should not change.
It’s easy to slip between literary past tense and present tense, especially while you’re drafting and the words are coming fast and furious, especially if you haven’t given a lot of thought in advance to which tense you’ll use to tell the story. Making some verb tense mixups in the first draft is common. However—letting those verb tense slips make it into the final, published product is one of the ways a manuscript announces to the world that it hasn’t been edited.
Don’t try to catch this while you’re drafting if it’s not coming naturally to you, but do make sure you catch it in revision before you set your book live.
4. Head-Hopping
Head-hopping is like verb tense–mixing, but with point of view. Head-hopping happens when the author doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, or can’t decide, or keeps forgetting from what point of view the story is being told. As a result, the perspective may shift around from one character to another, or from a third-person to a first-person narrator.
It’s okay to tell a story from more than one point of view; lots of popular books do this—for instance, A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. These authors are not head-hopping (at least in these books, they’re not). They’re telling a story from multiple different, separate, perspectives. Each point of view character has their own separate perspective, knowledge of events, thoughts, and narrative voice.
When head-hopping, a writer begins telling the story from one character’s perspective but dribbles in information from other characters or shifts to the perspective of another character with no warning to the reader. For instance, if Susan is thinking about her twenty-two year marriage while she buries her freshly murdered husband in the back yard, and then suddenly we have thoughts from Susan’s friend Kate entering the picture, and then maybe some thoughts from Bill (isn’t he dead?).
Unless your story is about a bunch of telepaths who each know everything the others are thinking, make sure you keep your characters’ perspectives separate and logical.
5. Too Many Characters
Finally, the case of the too many characters. Creating characters is a fun and rewarding part of writing; I get that. I think most writers probably do. It’s just sometimes we get carried away and think all the characters we invented need to be inserted into the story when, often, just a few will do.
Compounding the issue of “too many characters” are elements from above items “the mirror scene” and “the exposition-laden start.” Inexperienced writers may feel that each time a new character is introduced, readers need a full briefing about that character’s physical appearance and backstory.
Now: As in real life, it’s expected in fiction that everyone we meet has a physical appearance and a backstory. That’s normal. Everybody has those. But the fiction reader doesn’t need or want to be told the full physical appearance and backstory of every character we meet. That’s too much information for the reader, especially for supporting or minor characters.
When reviewing the cast of characters, writers should make sure there aren’t two where one would do. If you have a group of soldiers—do you need them all? Are they all filling different roles in the story? If not, consider conflating a few of them. It’s fine to still have five if five is the number of people you need to make the scene feel lively, but not all of them need names, descriptions, and backstories.
You can have James the captain who is missing an eye, Mike the handsome young scout with everything to prove, and three other soldiers. Readers aren’t going to audit the soldier rolls and match up beds in the barracks to the names you gave them. You don’t have to provide a detailed accounting for everyone who was there—just the ones that matter.
Don’t gum your reader’s brains up with details that don’t matter. Leave them some bandwidth to enjoy the story.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.