5 HUGE Amateur Writing Pitfalls & Their Fixes

hello everyone alexa dunn here and today i am going to be going in depth into some of my top tips to help amateur writers level up their writing and improve their craft specifically i'm going to go all in on five key areas where i see a lot of writers who i would call 201 writers they're past 101 they've written a novel they've maybe even written a few revised if you tried querying but something still isn't clicking i've done the fun listicles in the past of top novice writing mistakes and i actually was going to do an update to the one i made almost three years ago and i still probably will cause they're a lot of fun and until you hear something as a potential pitfall of an amateur writer it might not occur to you but developing those outlines i kept wanting to come up with tons of really good examples and advice for well how do you actually fix those mistakes and hence i am making this video i singled out the five that i see over and over and over again through critique partnering and mentorship that aren't exactly easy to fix none of this is easy but there are actionable steps you can take to work on any of these five things if you do these five things but i'll say very often what i see in writers where it's just not clicking is that they're not just doing one or two of these things they're doing multiple of them or all of them they're common pitfalls for amateur writers for a reason i will have time stamps down below so that you can jump around to the sections that are going to serve you the most especially because this is probably going to be a semi-long one because i do want to dig in on each of these and be as helpful as i can but even there i know i'm going to miss things and this can't possibly be definitive so i just hope that this helps as a good jumping off point for anyone who is struggling with these things and just to give you a sneak peek the five things i'm going to be covering are dialogue scenes tags etc scene function and filler writing a lot while communicating very little over writing but a very particular kind of overwriting ineffective writing we'll call it repetitive and kind of basic sentence style and writing style and the fifth one the big one the frustrating one is telling probably the number one thing that i see amateur writers falling into and some of the other four are aspects of telling but yeah i'm going to go all in on telling some things that you can look for and how to fix it in my experience walt while telling is the number one thing that holds back amateur writers all right are we ready to jump in so starting off with dialogue this is a catch-all category because what i find tends to fall under issues that people have with dialogue it's either their dialogue first writers where they're actually good at dialogue and they're comfortable with dialogue i definitely started off as that kind of writer myself and so there's just walls of text of dialogue of characters talking and very little to anchor it which can be a contributing factor to white room syndrome as well as the issue of overwriting but overrating as it relates to dialogue scenes english teachers love to say said is dead but in professional fiction no said is the invisible default and very often i just see writers rely so heavily on fun colorful dialogue tags and verbs that it actually leads their writing being a little bit ridiculous a little bit over the top distracting and it can also contribute to telling all in all i see a lot of novice writers struggle with dialogue and scenes where people talk and how to manage those sections to improve their writing so this is area number one where you can definitely focus and take actionable steps to improve the first one i already mentioned seriously when in doubt say said you don't always have to say that they shouted or they whispered they yelled or those action tags that are often confused with dialogue tags he smirked he smiled he arched a brow i mean we can talk about a lot of that fanficky stuff so i mean pin in that action tags are not bad we're going to talk about action tags but when in doubt if you're not sure what to put there's nothing wrong with putting said or you don't always have to have a dialogue tag for a speaker and in fact it's gonna make your rating feel much clunkier if you have he said she said they said i said after every single line of dialogue you have to develop your other writing skills within dialogue scenes to support dialogue and move a reader through a scene which i'm going to talk about so that you don't always have to say a dialogue tag to refer to who is speaking in particular be careful tagging with names because an overabundance of using characters names either in the dialogue itself or in the tags can just really bog down the writing and to be distracting for your reader and as i mentioned avoid those flowery over descriptive dialogue and action tags where you're going overboard trying to describe how things are said and how characters are acting as i mentioned this can fall into telling territory there's a difference between a strong action verb and telling language and what a lot of writers fall into in dialogue especially in fan fiction is going overboard with describing every single thing that a character does or how they say it and that's just as bad as not saying anything at all but what are you supposed to do so action tags aren't bad and every once in a while it's not a horrible idea to describe someone smiling or smirking or laughing or arching a brow having a reaction to someone but it's about a balance of action and what that action does you're balancing grounding your readers in the scene physically where is the character what are they doing as they are speaking what are they doing when someone else is speaking and how can you use those little bits in between dialogue to remind a reader where they are how they're feeling and yes a bit of how they are reacting but you don't want to go overboard with how your character reacts because telling or even with how other characters are acting because filtering we're gonna talk more about those later and actually one tip i have for breaking things up is to sparingly but thoughtfully use internal dialogue essentially especially in a first person narrative or a close third it can be really helpful in a dialogue scene to have little lines and cues for your reader of how your character is reacting to something without using filtering language like i think i feel but also without having to verbalize that it can go a long way for voice actually to have kind of internalizations like they crack a joke to themselves they think something sarcastic or they express doubts for the reader's benefit only it's about grounding your reader in two ways physically in the space and in your characters your pov characters emotions and feelings and reactions to the dialogue a go-to tip here and a lot of places honestly in terms of judging up your writing is to think about sensory details visuals are actually the most basic of sensory details to include i actually would say you should focus more on the other senses the way that something feels the texture of something the smell of something the taste of something sound hearing these are sensory details that you can use to add context to a scene to add texture to a scene so that a reader feels like they are there and you evoke the feeling of the main character so it's not just wall-to-wall dialogue back and forth it's not just telling the reader they're angry now that upset them it's finding artful ways to break up and contextualize dialogue so that your scenes are more purposeful and vivid and some of the other sections i'm going to talk about i'm going to give you some examples of good and bad writing including one with dialogue so you'll hear an example of a dialogue scene that does this so essentially when you're going through your work you want to look for dialogue scenes where you just have a ton of people talking back and forth very little in between and you have to ask yourself is there enough context going into this dialogue exchange is there enough context coming out of it and how can i edit the actual dialogue scene so the reader feels more grounded in that experience when you pull it off and do it artfully you're going to earn those moments where the dialogue stands alone and speaks for itself every once in a while you earn that back and forth in a dialogue that just smacks the reader in the face and they don't need dialogue tags and they don't need action tags or anything else to know exactly how they should be feeling but wall-to-wall dialogue it just leaves a reader treading water in a vast ocean and they don't know what to do with it your book is not a play you need all of the other aspects to ground the reader next i'm going to talk about scene function and filler writing this is another one i see all the time where writers especially on early drafts will just stuff their books full of scenes that don't do anything it has cute or sweet banter or it's going through the everyday minutia of a character's life but it's boring it doesn't do anything it feels like filler these are the number one culprits in dragging your pacing and causing readers to lose interest this is how you bore a reader a reader should never be in a scene and think what is the point of this or where is this going every single scene in your manuscript should have a function it should serve both the overall plot as well as character ideally both in the same scene every scene should be doing a lot of work and juggling a lot of balls and you should never have character development so yes you want to develop a rapport between two characters for example so you have your cute scene at the dinner table or at the lockers of some banter but if that scene setting as well as that cute banter does nothing to advance the plot it really shouldn't be in your book most times it's a matter of recasting that dialogue into a more effective scene or combining it with other scenes and characters and function for any given scene you should be asking yourself the questions of what does my character know going into the scene what do i need them to know in order for the next plot point to happen and how does this scene serve that or alongside that what does the reader know going into the scene what do i need them to know to bump them along to the next plot point does your reader really need to see your character do their makeup or take a shower or eat a meal have inane everyday conversation with random characters who ultimately aren't going to contribute much to the narrative what do those interactions and scenes actually do for the reader you know my examples are very mundane everyday things most of the time when you see this it is in the beginning of novels and a lot of writers think they have to show you the play-by-play of someone's everyday life now there are aspects of that play-by-play and status quo that can be very effective for set up in a novel especially when you're inciting incident is going to turn their entire world on its head but it's a matter of carefully picking out details of what you're going to show and make sure that the other things happening are important if you want to show a character getting ready and having breakfast with their family whatever the interaction is with their family it has to be really critical to establishing character to character growth to statement of theme for setting up conflict and stakes and it shouldn't be used for info dumping i am going to talk more about info dumping again in the almighty telling section but this is another kind of mistake that a lot of writers make they go well i need to get all of these characters together so i can dump a bunch of backstory on the reader within the context but whenever possible you should be looking for active ways to reveal that information through pointed interaction or dialogue and very often it's the scene setting itself that gives you a much more effective way to communicate information two characters talking by their lockers isn't going to be as dynamic or as interesting as an emergency assembly or just a regular assembly where you have a large collection of different characters a lot of different conflicts and interactions and maybe the principal gives a speech that conveys essential information that's just one dynamic example for high school specifically it could be a party you guys know that i love parties and that's the thing you should be looking for scenes and settings the settings themselves should say something or offer conflict for your main character so that you give them something to rub up against but always ask yourself how much of the minutia does your reader really have to know in that assembly example yes it's interesting but do they really need to be with your character as they're walking through the hallways entering the gym describing every corner of the gym walking up the bleachers selecting their seat observing every single person around them maybe if you can do that in a line or two very effectively but i see writers do paragraphs and paragraphs and pages and pages of this drawn out play-by-play and that is the kind of filler you need to look for look for places to be really brutal with yourself and cut sometimes entire chapters if what you have is not serving a function so i want to give you examples from my own writing where i have had to learn this lesson i have gone to the well of group meals many times and here's the thing there's nothing wrong with a group meal a group meal can be a very dynamic scene but if you return to that well over and over again you can stagnate so in one of my books i had multiple dinner parties and they started to feel redundant and in one particular case i completely recast the function of the scene the conflicts that i needed my characters to have to a brand new location and that brand new location and the mechanics of that location introduced delicious new conflict and stakes for my characters and by making myself rewrite it i brought my writing and the conflict and the stakes to a whole new level i took a dinner party scene and i recast it as a sexy game of marco polo in a pool i've got my character in a bathing suit around her ex-boyfriend and her sister is flirting with him and her cousin maybe has something up her sleeve and it's way more interesting in a pool than it was around a dinner table another example from my latest book is my characters needed to have an emergency meeting and i had previously had one in a dorm room and returning to that kind of tried and true location introduced pacing drag to the story they had to kind of travel to that location it had to be a little bit later in the day and my editor's brilliant suggestion was where can they meet a dynamic spot where they were where it's going to increase the tension and so i set it in a bathroom and if you've ever been a girl in the girls bathroom with your friends and y'all need to have a serious conversation go down you know the automatic kind of tone and conflict and stakes that having it in the bathroom that having it in a public place introduces the scene is so much better now and in fact in writing it i was able to introduce new complications to it that was the case in the pool scene as well just changing the scene setting and understanding the function that you need a scene to have can introduce all sorts of wonderful new dynamics similarly you can think about your scenes and how they contribute to your world building can you have characters who need to have a conversation and instead of having it in a static or a repetitive location can you have them do a change of scenery can they go to a new location that is going to be important in the story later one that introduces new aspects of character and world building can they go on a walk can they go in a car in my latest project i decided to set a conversation between my character and her grandmother in a car ride and it gave my character the opportunity to see the haves and have-nots of the new town to which she moved now i could have had that conversation at the breakfast table and it just would not have been that interesting because the reader had already been introduced to the house and the grandma what makes the conversation now dynamic and interesting is that it happens on the go so always think about your scene function and what might be seen as spiller especially if you're doing blow-by-blow play-by-play of mundane activities so the third novice mistake i see a lot and this is when writers write a lot of words and they write a lot of long-ish sentences and even long paragraphs and they're saying very little i guess this kind of also speaks to filler but i mean also on the solo line level as well it's overly complex repetitive meandering sentences they're a pain to read they're frustrating especially when you as the reader realize well you already said that or worse that doesn't mean what you think it means it's always best to be clear and concise in your writing very often i actually see this with writers who are trying really hard to be evocative in their writing to be descriptive in their writing show don't tell well the dark side of show don't tell is using so many words and phrases and clauses that you actually obfuscate what you're trying to say and you don't sound smarter or better at writing you just look a little bit confused and it doesn't make for a very pleasant reading experience and readers are more likely to nope out of your writing because it does start to feel like filler one example that i came up with was the summer shower sprinkles lightly against my skin as it rains so a shower generally is already inferred to be a light rain so you don't have to say sprinkles lightly summer shower more than effectively communicates what it is similarly ending that sentence with as it rains again you already said it was raining and in fact you were descripted with your first three words of what kind of rain it was now the against the skin part this could be interesting but you can go further how does it feel against your skin can you think about temperature or honestly does it even matter could you simply say it's raining does the summer shower matter at all these are the things to consider are you adding details and descriptions and kind of meandering sentences because you think that you need to be more descriptive be very precise about what you're writing and why it's far more effective that the summer shower reminds the character of when they were a child and it brings up feelings or the summer shower soaks them and that adds complications to the narrative there should always be function to the things that you are describing but also just on a sentence level that was not a good sentence i purposely wrote a very bad sentence but i see a lot of writing that has a lot of sentences like that they look like they're saying a lot and they ultimately say nothing similarly what i have seen is the unnecessary use of past perfect and i i know that's like really specific but i legitimately do see this a lot in novice writing it's adding an extra had past tense past perfect verb to sentences just because it just adds an additional layer of complication to the writing that is not necessary most of the time so the example that i have yes this is based on a real thing but i i changed the details to protect the guilty my mother had always said gardening was the root of happiness i saw something like this as an opening line for a book and the first thing i thought was you know that would be a much cleaner sentence if you eliminated literally just one word just one word makes it a cleaner sentence and that alternative that is much better more direct is my mother always said gardening was the root of happiness direct and effective but there are also other ways to tackle similar ideas i do want you to think about varying your sentence structure varying your style in the next section i'm actually going to talk all about varying your sentence style but i did do an example of this where you do something just a little bit different a little bit voicey using the same idea gardening is the root of happiness that's what my mama always said another aspect of sentences that seem to say a lot but say very little yeah we're going to talk about filtering language again this is going to come up in telling as well and in fact get ready i'm going to make an entire video on filtering it is time filtering is when you filter the reader's experience of something through the point of view of your main character filtering is of course a very natural part particularly of first-person writing but the thing about filter words is that they do weaken your writing so the sentences that are going to feel clunky and weighed down these are the ones that are going to start with i feel i see i hear i sense things like that you're adding a dimension to the sentence that just gives it an extra weight when you could simply say instead of i hear a branch crack in the woods a branch cracks to my right it's your opportunity to be more direct more active and just more exciting another thing in terms of sentences to say a lot but say very little i see a lot of writers use weak verbs and repetitive constructions and what you want to do here is use more complex strong specific verbs to basically say the same thing but honestly better shorter and sweeter so an example of this that i came up with was i walk home so fast that i practically run much stronger would be something like i race home race as a verb it just has this connotation of tension to it that is much better than i walk so fast i practically run and also using something short and sweet and direct like i race home gives you the opportunity to add more effective description to this maybe you do tack on something like i race home tripping over my shoelaces more than once or they scrape their knee or they ignore the buzzing of their cell phone in their pocket basically by using more direct specific exciting verbs you tighten up your language but also introduce new opportunities to have more effective description again that the dark side of show don't tell is it really depends on what you are showing not all details and descriptions are created equal and you can indeed end up having tons of imagery technically in your book but it's filler imagery it's imagery and description that doesn't actually do anything in terms of character or pacing or suspense so another thing to look for with kind of the long mannering sentences that don't do much is sloppy grammar sloppy grammar but also kind of i'll call it lazy grammar and usage and i do this by the way but i've also had to really take myself to task in my writing of doing it less often and that is relying on tons of commas i love commas look for spots where you're doing long sentences with lots of commas uh m dashes ellipses again i love these things but you'd be amazed how looking for more direct ways to have a series of sentences or phrases or clauses it's just in many cases going to be more effective writing it's literally easier for the reader's eye to move over a series of short concise specific and direct sentences than it is to move through a long meandering sentence with a ton of semicolons and commas and em dashes and ellipses and asides oh i had a huge problem with the size for a long time that's when you put things in parentheses and when you look for ways to eliminate those and clean up your writing first of all it's gonna help your writing style and varying your sentence structure which is the next section but also it gives you license to use those things those stylistic things much more effectively when you do use them i still love a well-applied em dash or a side or ellipses but i use them sparingly so this is one of those things where i challenge you to look for these crutches in your own writing and you don't have to get rid of all of them but take it one scene at a time challenge yourself to change every instance in one scene or half of them in the entire project it's a great way to start once you identify these things that you're doing repeatedly so that you can basically start training yourself to write better and last but certainly not least it kind of falls under the umbrella of all the rest of the stuff but i just want to give a special shout out to my friends out there who use tons of purple prose that basically renders your sentence completely meaningless i mostly see this in either fantasy or literary writing and i just want to put it out there as a warning you look super novice when essentially you don't quite understand how the words that you're choosing actually work especially within more complex grammatical constructions i've just seen completely nonsensical writing that definitely looks and sounds pretty but ultimately is meaningless i've actually seen this in some published books but regardless i consider it to be a real amateur mistake to use big fancy words and overworked metaphors because you think it sounds literary and smart truly smart talented writers understand what words mean and know how to use them in a sentence it's just a warning to be careful if your writing style does tend to be kind of flowery and descriptive be aware of those kind of pitfalls of the dark side of show don't tell it's about what you're choosing to show but also the literal meaning of the words you can also definitely go overboard on stylistic writing like using gerunds and clauses and phrases you can basically go so overboard on style that it renders your writing gobbledygook so the fourth section i'll move through pretty quickly it is the cousin to the third one and this is specifically repetitive sentence style repetitive basic sentence style and this is a novice mistake i see all the time in first person writing specifically so that's definitely what i'm going to focus on but bear this section in mind with the third one very likely if you have a problem with number three or vice versa if you have a problem with number four you probably have a problem with the other one as well this is essentially a problem where almost all of your sentences and certainly i'll notice it with paragraphs i'll skim over a page and if every single paragraph starts the same way it starts to blur together and that's the i verb construction over and over and over again in first person writing i do this i do that i say i speak it's a huge pitfall of first person which is simultaneously i think both the easiest and the hardest point of view for writers to write in it's the easiest because we're all the first person narrative of our own lives and stories but accordingly i see a lot of writers fall into the pattern of well i'll just say i blank over and over and over again because that's how you write first person that's how you write first person poorly the challenge in first person is to find varying sentence styles and varying sentence structure so that your reading feels fresh and dynamic so the reader doesn't feel like they're reading the same sentence in sentence construction over and over and over again and again i'm going to go over it in the telling section but this definitely contributes to the problem of a book feeling like it is wall to wall telling partly because a lot of these eye verb constructions are also using filtering by using it over and over again you're automatically filtering everything through that lens of your main character and that just adds distance to the writing so some tips on fixing this you just have to try a lot harder not to start all of your sentences with eye and blank so how do you begin to tackle this honestly looking at your use of filter words is a big one you need to look for all of those places where you're saying i feel i think i see i hear and so on all you have to do is knock that filtering off and already you're gonna have a sentence that isn't going to start with i in a verb it's going to be a stronger more direct sentence and you can pepper those in between your i statements you're not getting rid of i statements it's first person you have to have them you also have to have filtering filtering itself doesn't have to be evil but too much filtering bogs down a work another thing you can do and this is actually going to help you to develop writing style and voice you don't always have to write in complete sentences i know that you're like what now you do of course have to learn kind of the rules to break them but there are a lot of writers who do fantastic stylistic writing where they're going to use incomplete clauses and phrases and i love sentences that start with gerunds for style that's really fun usually gerunds are used as like in a series of lists and it's like a building onto something to describe something and a writer who does this really really well is actually rory power i noticed the style in her writing and i mean i eat it up but i want to give you an example and you'll see that it's descriptive and specific and evocative first person and it has a lot of voice breakfast wasn't much and i'm feeling the shake of hunger in my limbs i know buy it is too so we're quick as we head downstairs for lunch to the main floor to the hall with its big high ceilings look at the repeat of that to the to the in describing that's good writing scarred tilting tables a fireplace and tall backed couches stuffing ripped out to burn for warmth that's technically not a complete sentence i mean it is you know the rules to break them but think about what that's doing how evocative it is it's very descriptive but it doesn't have a subject and a verb and the final sentence which i love and us full of us humming and alive and also give you an example from my own writing i can't hold a candle to worry but just a bit of reading that includes both an i verb sentence but is followed by something else i blink slowly shake my head as if to clear it because i must have misheard that is actually part of a dialogue scene so that's a good example bringing it back to the first one that's something that you can insert between dialogue it tells you what the character is doing and it gives you a sense of what they are thinking how they are reacting to something that's been said here is another example i pulled out from my own work from the ivies of kind of playing around with incomplete sentences essentially to kind of fill something with description and voice without resulting to a series of telling eye phrases but i would never dare be so glib not today the phone rings shredding already delicate nerves and i jump into action yes we understand you are upset no you cannot speak to the headmistress at this time kill them with kindness but remain firm promise to take down the details and head mistress fitzgerald will give them top priority as soon as possible i'm literally describing something that's happening but i'm also giving you a sense of kind of protocol the tenseness of my main character's feelings about these things and in the writing itself i used italics for the things that were inferring things that she said to parents on the phone i didn't break into dialogue for that as it would really kind of ruin the flow of the paragraph and that by the way is how i described hours of a character doing something in the story in a single paragraph so lastly is an example that i mentioned with dialogue and again this is an example of there are eye constructions but you're also making clear direct statements which reflect observations which describe things which move a reader through a scene without resorting to the same sentence structure over and over again so the first speaker is my main character olivia hey rebecca good game she narrows her eyes at me what do you want olivia i concede offering a pathetic grimace behind me diana screams at nisha who just launched a shell at her can we um i direct her over to the windows away from the mario madness on the couch but once we are reasonably ensconced in the corner my mind goes blank i don't know how to start i offer these examples not because i'm the end all be all of writing but because i feel weird using other people's writing as examples though obviously i pulled out worries but these are just examples to kind of get your mind ticking over if you find in your writing that you are returning to that well of i go i do i see over and over and over again that repetitiveness in your sentence structure and writing that is a barrier between you and your story and the reading and part of leveling up your writing is thinking of other ways to position your sentences to describe things to move characters through a scene and through this you're not only going to improve your writing this is how you develop writing style and voice i will say you don't have to be running in 100 in every single scene of your book every single sentence but it's about artfully tackling in revision select scenes select chapters and like really polishing up that writing to a shine so that you can have sections where maybe that was a day that you it matters a little less the perfect execution of that scene so you can get a little lazy in some parts of your book the problem is when 80 90 of your book is that kind of amateurish writing you're not able to skate by okay all of this brings me to the big one which is telling telling is the worst as i said this is the number one thing that is standing between you as an amateur writer and being better at writing and i'm speaking to you as someone who has struggled with telling my whole life i've been actively working on my telling issues for a very long time decades and as you know if you watched some of my previous videos i'm not here to tell you if you'd write in a telling style that you're garbage and you have to show and be descriptive and be lyrical i'm not that kind of writer and you don't have to be that kind of writer the key is to work actively on different aspects of telling that do put that distance into the writing that do stop readers from connecting with your stories you just have to target some of these specific areas some of which i've already gone over and do your best over time to level up your craft so i'll try to move through this quickly some of this is kind of covered in the other sections because telling is basically like the big granddaddy that sits over most amateur writing mistakes or a large number of amateur writing mistakes and so the first one is that filler it is that blow by blow and very often within that it is that repetitive sentence structure i do this i do that or if you're in third person she does this she does that so instead of writing like this think about that varying your sentence structure that i mentioned and think about those examples you're finding ways to move a character through a scene to move a reader through a scene and have meaningful interesting active interactions that perform that work so instead of a blow-by-blow of a character moving through a space or through an action you can have a few sentences describing it but then what if someone interrupts them a character comes along and asks them a question or gets in their face and you can actually use those character interruptions i have this as a writing hack at one point i called it introduce an interruption and that's basically what it is you're using a brief active dramatic scene narration versus dramatization another thing i'm going to link to down below to demonstrate something instead of relying on that more passive narration the difference i see between the issue of walt while telling an amateur writer and a writer who is more experienced is the amateur writer never effectively dramatizes or very rarely effectively dramatizes and that's what you have to work on it's drastically reducing the amount of telling you're doing and looking for artful places to have dramatization and conflict and active things happening so the example that i came up with imagine two sisters sitting on the couch marcy tells me to change the channel i stick my tongue out and try to find something we both like there's not actually anything fundamentally wrong with that and depending on where that fell in a scene those two sentences could be completely fine especially if it came after a really detailed and active scene or if it directly precedes an active scene but i challenged myself to rewrite it in a more active and dramatic way using dialogue keep your toes to yourself marcy i wriggle out of her toe range they're cold to boot you have the remote change the channel she digs her wiggly ass toes into my ribs again fine i grit out no reality marcy dictates with a triumphant spurk little fanficky but forgive me effing sisters in the actual text i would use the f word but that's a combination in my writing style of course of kind of the specific actions that are happening you can feel the sister's annoyance with each other without necessarily having to say it and i have the main character having kind of snarky aside to kind of communicate her personality and their relationship if i continued writing this scene i'd have something about how they really love each other and it would definitely be part of a scene specifically contributing to the main thrust of the plot so the next big thing in telling is info dumping huge huge issue that amateur writers have and i mean it takes time to learn how to effectively communicate back story context etc in fiction in an effective way it takes practice but the way you don't want to do it is every time you meet a new character as soon as they appear on the page your main character goes into two or three paragraphs about their whole backstory or about exactly how they feel about that character or even worse i do see writers do this where i can tell they've constructed an entire scene remember that scene function thing just to dump some backstory about some characters sometimes yes you are going to construct a scene in order to essentially introduce characters and backstory but not for an info-dump i beg you not for an info dump you have to trust your readers the beginning of a book especially they're along for the ride with you and it's about dropping in nuggets bread crumbs of context and backstory sure when you first meet someone of course you're going to have to have some sort of context or backstory but instead of a few paragraphs about the entire history of how they met do a nugget it could be a specific anecdote maybe about how they met but it could just be something that really characterizes their relationship with each other it could even feel a little flashback-y this is actually something that i did in the ivies i inserted a flashback essentially of the first time my character olivia met the character emma and it's just a brief little exchange it actually involves a third character who's ultimately not important to the story saying something nasty to my character and emma swoops in and well she's nasty back but she basically saves my character from the situation it's incredibly important context and backstory though interestingly added in my last revision it tells you a lot about olivia as a character it tells you about what the school is like and it tells you a lot about emma and it adds layers to emma because she saves someone by being vicious and that's definitely an aspect of the character that i wanted to highlight so it's how you choose to kind of add context and backstory and that's just one way to do it another thing you can definitely do this is great for antagonistic characters or characters where there's a complex backstory this is essentially a suspense technique but you can use it in any kind of fiction let's say your character runs into their ex you don't need to dump the entire story of their relationship why they broke up etc frankly for most readers there's a shorthand simply by saying they're my ex but you can maybe put in a little detail it could be an echo of the last thing that person said to them when they broke up it could be an echo of something good followed by the sourness of them sneering at them in the present you can highlight little details that definitely give your reader the sense that something's up and then you save the reveal of those more important detail saline details for later you can have them come out in an argument a confrontation and this is all saving you from having big dumps of information in paragraphs or even using the example of my two sisters if that was a real scene in a book that interaction could lead you into a short but sweet paragraph that contextualizes the sister relationship it doesn't give you all the blow-by-blow details but you've just seen a colorful scene of how they interact with each other so a short but sweet paragraph of background slash context it goes down like butter how you transition into the information both in and out is very important so the next big thing i find as a problem in telling is the consistent and constant use of passive sentence constructions brush up on passive voice what it is passive verbs and look in your writing for passive writing constructions passive voice by its very nature adds distance to the writing so when a writer in addition to all these other kind of telling things is also relying on a ton of passive voice it's just that distance and when i feel very distanced by a story over and over and over again through all of the various traps you can fall into with telling it's just a turn off but passive voice in particular just kind of irks me it gets under my skin and makes me mad the next thing i mentioned in the dialogue section yeah it's those dialogue tags and action tags that are essentially telling it's verbs and descriptions and also the dreaded adverbs how have i gotten this far into the video without mentioning adverbs very often in those tags it's using adverbs to describe how they're doing things adjectives can do this as well but adverbs are the culprit again i'm never gonna tell you not to use adverbs i love adverbs but you do need to pay attention to how often you modify your descriptions to tell the reader exactly how something is being said or done or how something looks and when you say how something looks you're filtering which is the next thing so we'll just talk about filtering really examine what you're saying and how are you filtering a ton of your statements are you telling them exactly how to feel about something by repeatedly doing things like saying she laughed or she chuckled or she looked upon him with scorn for example all of these are fine in moderation but i find a lot with amateur writers who have problems with telling that they go to that well over and over and over again in the name of descriptive writing honestly it's deceptive you think you're showing cause you're describing something but you're actually telling telling is is truly an achilles heel and as i mentioned i share it and so i'll end since i've talked about most of the things i want to talk about with the best you can do is the best you can do i hope this video and me rambling on for far too long about five major pitfalls that i just see amateur writers make over and over again and usually in conjunction because all of these are basically cousins to each other and telling is their their granddaddy i like that i'm gonna use that from now on telling is the granddaddy of amateur writing mistakes and you have all these things under it they kind of work together it's overwhelming if you go i'm a bad writer i have to fix it but it's manageable and actionable if you take even one of the things on this list that you're positive that you do and you work to fix it you look to identify it in your writing and then you just go line by line word by word and you do revision it's swapping out one word for another word it's taking a sentence or the the gist of a whole paragraph let's say you're like i think i just used 100 words to describe something that could be done in a one really effective sentence or maybe two it's doing that work and i'll tell you when i do this i still do it now and i've been doing it for years and this is the slow steady process of leveling up you can spend an hour you can set an hour on a particularly tricky description but of course as you do it more it does come more naturally and you can take a scene let's say you have a scene and you know that you have a ton of repetitive i statements you think you're maybe kind of chewing on the scenery too much you're over describing the wrong things maybe you got some filtering language going on just rewrite that scene read it over if you have scrivener you can do this with word too i like to have the original in one window and a blank on the other side and i'll go back and forth and i'll just challenge myself line by line paragraph by paragraph idea by idea it's ultimately ideas what are you trying to communicate in this scene and you try writing it again you try writing it differently and solely but surely over time you will get better but you're also not alone well ultimately you do have to identify this in your own writing and self-editing really only you can do this you also have critique partners look for critique partners who are willing to actually give you this feedback who are willing to go through maybe a scene or a chapter and line edit for you really line at it you have to tell them be brutal with me and you have to mean it uh it's amazing how another writer or an editor i've learned so much from my editors just going through and pointing out well you could say it this way or this isn't this as strong a word as it could be it's like mind-blowing and sometimes you do need someone else to help you out so seek out critique partners if your current critique partners if they're kind of at the same level of writing as you sometimes you do have to kind of go a level up and tell them to be brutally honest with you but you actually have to mean it do a sample chapter and and see what you get from it slowly but surely i promise you you can root out these individual things and level up and get better let me know down below in the comments if you have any questions about any of these things that i've talked about i made this video because i realized i make all of these kind of well these are problems in writing these are concepts in writing but i wanted to try to make something that was a little bit more concrete that might actually help you kind of dig into your writing i can't line edit all of your manuscripts if i could i'm honestly not detail-oriented to be good at line editing but there's so much value in kind of staring your writing straight in the face and it's potential pitfalls especially telling it's always telling and really trying to make the change give this video a thumbs up if you like it and i will make more pointed craft type videos as always guys thank you so much for watching and happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 37,583

Rating: 4.9679055 out of 5

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, amateur writing, writing fixes, writing mistakes, fix writing mistakes, amateur writing mistakes, novice writing mistakes, show don't tell, telling vs. showing, narrate vs. dramatize, white room syndrome, writing dialogue, sentence style, writing voice, writing scenes

Id: ZA0pW97Z6MA

Length: 50min 56sec (3056 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020