The WORST Amateur Writing Mistakes | 22 Novice Writer Issues

hello everyone alexa dunn here and today i am going to be going over 22 of the worst amateur writing mistakes that people make these are novice moves things that i see over and over again just in kind of beginning level writing the good news is all of it is fixable but i find until you kind of hear about a thing about a concept and are aware that it is a problem it's hard to see it in your own work so i'm going to run over the 22 that i just see over and over again everywhere from kind of 101 amateur writing like really like beginner writing but even up to kind of like the 201 almost 301 space like slightly more advanced amateur mistakes and i did make a video recently where i went super in depth about five of the kind of overarching categories represented here where i gave concrete helpful tips for actually how to fix them that was to save this video from being 8 million minutes long because 22 is a lot and i have a tendency to basically try to start to explain things and help you fix them so i will link down below to that video and i'll mention when i go over any of these that are covered in that video so you know that you can go over there to learn more i've also made plenty of standalone videos about several of these so you'll find tons of applicable helpful links down below but y'all are here for a gentle roasting listicle style for the salt for the tea of what the worst amateur writing mistakes are so i am just going to jump right in with the first one which is tense shifting classic 101 mistake that is when you are writing and in a given paragraph or page it oscillates wildly between present tense past tense i've even sometimes seen it between first and third but most often it's going to be a case of like i pace across the room and then i sit i waited five minutes for a person to show up that is tense shifting basically every single time you do it you're going to create cognitive dissonance in your reader it's confusing frustrating and it's gonna make them stop reading which is not what you want you want consistency once you pick a tense you have to stick with it and understand how grammar works with that tense the second amateur writing mistake is info dumping you're gonna see this up front in a book where you just get paragraphs and paragraphs of telling explanations of context and backstory this is when on the second page of your novel you decide that the reader needs three whole paragraphs about your character's relationship with their mother this is one of the ones covered in that amateur fix video again link down below again this is going to trip up your reader every time they hit something like that it's going to pull them out of the present action of the story and that kind of long pause is not good most often what info dumping does frankly is it bores your reader there is an artful way to dispense necessary information and build suspense and info dumping is not the way the third amateur writing mistake is excessive dialogue tags this is the problem where every single time you have someone speaking someone say something you add a dialogue tag hello how are you i said i'm great regina answered how's the weather today i asked it's sunny regina answered and so on and so forth and so forth where every single line it's like dialogue speaker dialect speaker you don't need a dialogue tag for every single time someone speaks and the fourth thing you don't need is overly complicated dialogue tags or i like to call them telling overly descriptive fanficky dialogue tags where in addition to tagging every single bit of speech you're going super overboard by saying whispered shouted hissed smirked yes that thing in fanfic where you actually use an action tag mistakingly as a dialogue tag this definitely falls under here and in fact action tags are not getting away with this it's anything you use to tag dialogue that has really flowery verbs telling verbs very often in these spots you're also going to be committing adverb abuse which is another huge part of it telling language amended to dialogue that is just over the top and reads like fan fiction he whispered quietly as a smirk crossed his face that kind of overwriting the fifth worst amateur writing mistake is repetitive sentence structure this is another one that i cover in that amateur fixes video this is where the majority of your sentences start the same way with a noun verb construction especially bad in first person this is i go i say i feel i do i walk and you're not varying your sentence structure and again that kind of trudging language it feels trudging to the reader of i am reading the same thing over and over again these sentences are not exciting or doing anything special i also see this with first person alternating between i do and then the thing so you're still using a very basic noun construction the blank blanks for almost all of your sentences you're not playing with language or sentences or fragments structure and so your writing is just very pedestrian very basic so the sixth amateur writing mistake is mellow drama this is when you take your characters and certain scenes super over the top this is another one that happens a lot in fanfiction type writing disclaimer wrote fanfiction have nothing against fan fiction but i did this myself and it is true it's that soup upper style writing we're out of nowhere you just have this big dramatic scene where your characters are shouting and crying and making bold declarations and it's not supported in the rest of the writing style or the characterization it's like whiplash when you go from a pretty tonally normal story and writing style to big out of character emotional outbursts of declarations of love or villain monologues anything where it starts to feel over the top a little bit soap opery you might be falling into melodrama and you either have to do the writing so that the characters actually support those moments of melodrama or the entire tone of your book should be melodramatic but melodramatic writing is not a writing style that suits all fiction types so i generally advise people be incredibly careful with melodrama and the amateur writers who are more likely to tend toward melodrama instead just work on identifying those scenes in their books and essentially i always find that rewriting them helps the best to really think about well do they sound like a villain on a soap opera when they say this am i supporting this with proper characterization and so on the seventh amateur writing mistake also one that i covered in that amateur fixes video and i call this kind of overly convoluted writing style and the example that i use where you're throwing in extra words or descriptions or phrases into a sentence where it's just kind of redundant you're throwing extra things into your sentence but it's actually watering your sentence down as opposed to making it stronger ninety percent of the time you're just going to be better off with more direct and active language one particular place i see this is authors who go overboard with past perfect and they end up throwing extra instances of had in to their sentence and the example that i used in that other video based on a real example was my mother had always said that gardening was the root of happiness and it's automatically just a stronger better sentence more direct sentence if you drop the had my mother always said the gardening is the root of happiness direct statements you want to remove conditional phrasing essentially another example that falls under this that i used in the last video was something like i walked so fast i practically ran when instead you should be using a strong verb that says what you actually mean you're you race you race home you don't need all that extra i blank so practically adding again conditional phrasing it's just gonna water down your sentences and so it's a matter of looking for places where your sentences can simply be a lot stronger more direct more active so the eighth amateur writing mistake this one's pretty basic 101 but worth saying and that is persistent grammar mistakes things like run-ons misuse of punctuation tense issues those flat out are really bad amateur mistakes and they are going to get in the way of reading not saying you have to be perfect at grammar all of us are on kind of a learning curve but the reality is is that most people simply cannot get through writing that has a ton of mistakes in it spelling mistakes is included in this as well you have to work to clean up your prose enough for it to be readable if you hear from a beta reader or critique partner or writing group or what have you or even an agent that you have an issue with x y z grammar concept it could be commas semicolons run-ons really is a big one that i see kind of uh the grammar issues of using your verb tenses wrong like i see this with gerunds a lot dial into whatever that specific issue you have is and just teach yourself that particular concept and the eagle eyed for it in your menu script purdue has great resources for grammar and usage so i will link to that down below you can look up any basic grammar and usage concept and get a really clear explanation with tons of examples so i highly encourage you if you've gotten any kind of feedback or even if you just suspect you have some grammar and usage issues find a critique partner and ask them flat out to identify these issues for you so that you can do that kind of self education and self improvement step much like this video sometimes you just have to have someone directly point it out to you and then once you see it you can fix it the ninth amateur writing mistake another one i cover in that amateur fix this video and that is boring basic scene set ups that lead to a ton of filler this is writing where you have a ton of scenes often early in the book but you can do it throughout an entire book where it's basically characters just kind of ending up in random places and having random conversations they don't really contribute to the plot or if there is a plot point in this scene it's kind of buried beneath a ton of filler the filler can also kind of be blow by blow of characters going from one location to another it can actually be too much description which should have been one of the things on this list so i'm just gonna include it here and that is when yeah you're describing things but you're describing the wrong things you're going into long descriptions in filler scenes that don't actually serve a function to your characters or your plot so they exist but they don't do much so these ineffective scenes with tons of filler they're going to drag your pacing which is actually the next amateur mistake it's one of the most common amateur mistakes a completely understandable amateur mistake to not be very good at story pacing when you're first starting out i have never met a writer who didn't struggle with pacing on some level what is pacing it is essentially the speed at which your story moves kind of the momentum of your story and it's about hitting this perfect happy medium which isn't that frustrating what is a perfect happy medium well the problems that you see with pacing in amateur writing the things that you have to look to you could have multiple of these problems or you could struggle with one type in particular it's long sections that drag that have a lot of filler it is those ineffective scenes or it could even be scenes that you need to have in the book but you're dragging them out with excessive dialogue excessive conversation excessive naval gazing from your character info dumping can play in to pacing issues you can also have pacing that's too fast fast pacing isn't always a good thing because the happy medium of pacing it's a combination of the reader getting the information they need when they need it building suspense and tension character development world building and emotional response you have to consider the emotional reading experience of your reader especially if you have a problem with rushed pacing you always have to give scenes room to breathe either within those scenes or immediately following a fast-paced scene the readers need that room the characters need that room and so rushed pacing is a case where bam bam bam bam bam things happen but there's nothing like connective thread there isn't enough connective thread especially emotional character connective thread between them this could also happen when you have all a plot and no b plot which boils down to your plot is too simple so you can either have dragged pacing or rushed pacing and you can also have them in the same book in different parts it's most common to see dragged pacing in act 1 and rushed pacing in act 3 but some people suffer from the ration act 2 because it's hard to write or vice versa they're discovering act two so they drag their pacing it's a matter of identifying the specific problems in your book and then figuring out how to fix them so the 11th amateur writing mistake this kind of it's a cousin to info dumping kind of slash telling and it's what i call the well you know bob dialogue cheat and this is when you use characters in your story telling each other things as an info dumping telling cheat you know that you have to give your reader information so you're like i know i'll have them run into their good friend bob and they'll explain something to bob that the reader needs to know well you know bob we just had that election it was real tense and i i think there was some cheating but when you do this poorly it feels like it's coming out of nowhere it's a little bit too convenient a little bit too obvious and heavy-handed and it's definitely an amateur mistake because it's basically just an entry-level easy way to communicate necessary information and it's a matter of finding artful more advanced ways to do similar or same so basically look for parts in your book where you have characters especially if they're random characters who aren't actually important to the story randomly show up to communicate information so the 12th amateur writing mistake this one is a little more meta in terms of like whole story and that is when they have something that is either way too short or way too long for the word count conventions of whatever they are writing this includes a person who writes 13 000 words and calls that a novel that is at best a short story maybe on its way to being a novella it's when you write 250 000 words of your fantasy novel and the average word count of a debut fantasy novel is at most 120 000 words it is a proper novel but it's a sci-fi novel and it's only 50 000 words that's a red flag ooh there's not enough world building or complex of a plot so this is an amateur mistake of not having a firm enough understanding of the art form and very often indicates that a person doesn't actually read the kinds of things that they're writing or at the least hasn't done any research into conventions and those kind of too low or too high word counts or calling something a novel when it's a short story it indicates that there are myriad other issues because there's that kind of fundamental misunderstanding so the 13th amateur writing mistake this one kind of harkens back to that pacing mistake and that is all a plot no b plot definitely see this a ton in first drafts of first novels or early novel drafts by writers and that's when they definitely have an a plot in mind and a plot is the easiest plot to come up with it is your main plot and you come up with it and you outline it and bam bam bam bam bam you move through that story and you tell the story but very often it's a little too short or if it's not too short it has a ton of filler in it but if it's all a plot with no b plot whatsoever or other plots no subplots the book isn't going to be complex enough or complicated enough an a plot in and of itself is not usually a complete story basically a book that is all a plot no b plot will probably have serious pacing problems and is just generally going to feel not like a particularly complex or layered story so the 14th amateur writing mistake i actually love this one i made an entire video on it to try to help people with it and that is a lack of social world building that's what i call it but it basically boils down to your characters don't feel real they don't feel like layered complex fleshed out people who actually live in the worlds that you've created who occupy the worlds of your story you have them walking through big plots and having big emotions but it's not tethered to anything particularly in the beginning and when you don't have a firm sense of where your character starts and what your world really is because you're essentially world building through character with social world building it's basically your your book your plot the reading experience is going to feel very kind of it's like a fafsa meal of a story it's a thing that exists but it's so kind of simple and thin like you know watered-down milk that there's just very there's no fat to it there's no meat to it and it's like yeah it's a story but i didn't feel connected to it in any deep or specific kind of way and it's usually because there is a total lack of social world building it is essentially the problem where your characters feel very surface very flat yes they are technically characters who live and eat and breathe and exist in this space but you could swap them out for any other living breathing creature or human being and the plot would be exactly the same because you've given no texture to the world via texturizing your character by giving them specific wants and needs and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings and hobbies and all sorts of stuff by developing the social world you're not just developing your main character but all of your characters in your entire world because it becomes a more complex ecosystem because that's what life is it's a bunch of complex interlocking parts and when you skimp on those details the whole thing just falls flat so the 15th amateur writing mistake it's like the old dystopia joke but i mean we see it a ton in speculative fiction especially and that is excessive capitalization of things giving all sorts of things a proper noun as a way to sound fancy and speculative it's basically a writing cheat particularly in science fiction and fantasy writing it's not like you can never do it it's a convention of genre for a reason but i definitely consider it an amateur writing mistake because it's always the amateurs who you see going overboard with it so be wary of world building in your speculative fiction where it's like i know i'll just give it a kind of imposing proper noun that'll work yeah a little's okay a lot is a lot the 16th worst amateur writing mistake i hate this one this one's very 101 or at least it bugs me in particular and you're at the biggest risk of doing it in a third person but i mean i would not put it past an amateur writer to do it in first and that is head hopping so head hopping is when in a scene that is from the point of view of a particular character you suddenly jump into the head of another character and you have thoughts and feelings and observations that your pov narrator should not know now some styles of third person head hop is a matter of course and that is great for them but where this is a problem is when they are not writing that type of fiction i most often see amateur head hopping when they are writing limited pov they're in first person they're in third person limited it is from the point of view of say it's a y.a it's a teen princess and the teen princess is at court and all of a sudden i'm in the prince's head and what is happening if you want to write multi-pov that is fine but going back and forth between multi-pov in a single scene when you are doing close perspective it's just it's messy it's confusing for the reading it pulls them out of the story and the perspective they were in if you want to do it within a chapter you just need a little section break or do your different povs in different chapters you always want to keep track of what is the pov of this scene through whose eyes from what lens am i telling the story and you want to stick to that number 17 which i actually think is the worst amateur writing mistake personally it is the biggest thing that i think stands in the way of writers from leveling up and being better storytellers i could shout about it forever telling telling telling telling now i am not a show don't tell proselytizer because i am someone who tends towards telling and has struggled over the many years with telling but that's why i'm super confident and comfortable telling you that excessive telling is a massive amateur mistake you are directly getting in the way of your story your own writing and it getting across to readers in an effective way the thing with telling it's you're telling the story instead of letting a reader experience the story show don't tell is honestly very reductive telling is by its very nature passive in a way there's distance in telling now often the distance in narrative telling is actually a great storytelling technique when used specifically and in moderation so it's a matter of actually understanding what a narrative telling technique is and when to use it where telling becomes a problem in amateur writing i've actually covered it in some of these other things telling is info dumping telling is going overboard with televerbs and adverbs in your dialogue scenes telling is filtering which i did not give its own thing on this list but it's part of telling so it counts filtering is when you use verbs like feel see hear no decide assume and it basically literally creates a filter on an action i feel angry instead of describing anger it's blow by blow narration walking people through a mundane scene literally describing every single thing a character does and sees it's plotting storytelling and you basically get in the way of active and descriptive and interesting storytelling when all you do is tell i would seriously wager that a majority of writers who struggle to get to that next level who struggle to get an agent who have cps who ghost them and so on and so on if they're not doing the 101 amateur mistakes they have a problem with telling and may not realize it because telling is complex and there's a ton of amateur mistakes that come under telling it's basically all the things you do in your writing that put distance between the reader and the story and again i'm allowed to be really salty about this because i come from a tradition of telling and i've had to work on it myself you do not have to eliminate telling altogether it can be a very effective writing style as i mentioned i'm a trained journalist i would know but it's developing your skills so that you don't make some of these specific amateur mistakes so that your writing's a little more vivid a little more active you're varying your sentence structures you're creating really sensory scenes so that yeah you can have some lines of telling and it really doesn't matter because you just need to efficiently move them from one place to the other and it's totally fine but when you're doing that efficient telling writing all the time it stops being efficient when it's all that you have so the 18th amateur writing mistake this one bugs me in particular and that is a lack of internal logic for your characters and your character actions particularly antagonists that's where it's like pet peeve for me with antagonists but it's bad with any character particularly main characters when i was talking about melodrama part of melodrama often not working when it's like a blow-up scene of melodrama is if it breaks the internal character logic or the internal logic of a character it's not logical for them to lose their ish with someone and start shouting that is part of the problem there should always be internal story logic and again you should do that social world building because it's part of what gives you structure and logic to your character to your world how is the character feeling in this moment and why the why shouldn't be because i need them to feel sad because it's a sad plot point the why should be well they feel sad because x y z thing from their past they had a relationship here they really wanted this they have this personality trait or they had this traumatic experience there should be a rhyme and reason to every single beat of your character and look you can have a character need to do something for plot reasons but then you have to do the work going backwards to create story logic to create character logic to fit your plot you never want your reader to go why like i don't understand why they did that like that's weird that makes no sense you don't want to get into a situation where the character feels out of character they feel out of character because what is their character did you ground their character well enough if you did ground a character well enough but then they do something whack doodle you've broken your character and story logic but most often i find that the characters aren't grounded and that's why there isn't story logic but also for antagonists i hate it when someone just all of a sudden is like a total psycho because the story needs them to be you definitely want to have impeccable logic for your antagonists and there's actually a whole plot thing for writing thrillers where you should come up with kind of the story behind the story beat by beat of everything your antagonist like said and did and felt and was thinking and essentially fully developed that character so there's always an inherent logic to how they behave including when they're not being a huge villain so yeah lack of internal logic is a big one because then it just feels like a series of scenes and things that happen to a character in a story that technically has a plot but none of it is like cohesive it doesn't really come together the 19th worst amateur writing mistake is when you have pointlessly purple prose this is where you have a writer who thinks that to be a writer means to use big fancy words and big fancy constructions they're probably not using repetitive sentence structure or one-cent verbs they're using exclusively like fancy literary prose but what can end up happening is when a writer essentially writes pretentiously because they think it makes them sound smart or fancy the sentences and words and the way that things come together can ultimately feel kind of empty or meaningless there's a difference between a writer who has a really great command of english language and a very specific yes literary style and a writer who's stretching themselves and kind of over compensating or writing that way because they're imitating other writers and it's just definitely an amateur mistake of essentially imitating without substance so i caution writers honestly nothing wrong with a super basic simple sentence that you can edit later to make it more complex but kind of writing just ridiculous purple prose especially like overworked metaphors that don't technically mean anything and descriptions that are a little bit muddled that's not good writing so the 20th worst amateur writing mistake this one's pretty straightforward and that is overly formal writing your characters don't speak in contractions ever ever if you're writing any kind of modern fiction that isn't historical you're allowed to use contractions it's okay it doesn't make you sound basic there was this kind of old school convention in writing that that good educated writers did not use contractions i mean english teachers used to literally get mad about it same thing was starting a sentence with a conjunction which is now completely acceptable so that's the thing if you're overly formal in your writing style where it's like are we in english class in the 1950s the writing is going to feel belabored and a bit out of time it's not how people actually speak or think so yeah do not be afraid of informal language thoughtfully and artfully sprinkled through a manuscript if you're too formal the writing basically comes across stiff number 21 is my old friend character soup huge amateur writing mistake and that is just cramming your story full of dozens and dozens and dozens of characters you know that thing i mentioned the well you know bob where you basically use characters especially early on but they solely exist for exposition a lot of those characters can get cut and will contribute to character soup often we'll do character soup because we're striving for realism but there's this line between realism and it's this kind of elevated world of fiction where it's totally okay for a person to only have two friends not five or six or seven because realistically you can only keep track of so many characters your character doesn't have to name and describe every single character that they interact with in a story not every single person is going to be important you can say offhand that they passed a person and they said hello although that really doesn't contribute to story and that's the thing with character soup you have to brutally evaluate what are the actual character functions because there's only so many characters that readers can keep track of that readers can care about there's only so many characters you can give substantive character arcs to and so too many characters will feel like dead weight they over complicate a story and it's definitely an amateur mistake and it's a matter of cutting some of those filler characters when you are doing your revisions and number 22 is all about character and it is a combination of either characters with no flaws characters that nothing really bad happens to or characters who don't have agency in their story it's the amateur mistake of character problems particularly your main characters what often will fall under this as well is kind of the self-insert thing which i hesitate to call uh amateur writing mistake because i think everyone gets to have one self-insert character it's a thing that we do especially in earlier work and writing a self insert can actually be very instructive to writing characters generally and getting better at writing but what happens often with a self-insert is we're often not as quite aware of our own flaws so those characters are less likely to be flawed but also we're less likely to do terrible things to self-insert characters but even when they're not self-inserts we love our characters authors we love our characters like we build them and they're our babies and we want we want them to get what they want and so very often we won't put enough obstacles in their way or think bad things will happen to the character but it's not the worst thing that could happen to our character and often it's pushing yourself in just the right spot in your manuscript usually where you're encountering problems with pacing or with character arcs and growth you're getting feedback from people that the story loses steam or they don't understand a character choice and sometimes the thing that you have to do is get really really messy with your characters and don't be afraid to dirty them up but also look at agency it's a huge amateur pitfall not even 101 you can struggle with this you know for years and years and multiple manuscripts to have your character be active in the plot to not just have bad things happen to them now bad things can happen to them and then they can have agency in reacting to them but you still want to take care that some of the bad things that happens to them that enough of the things that happen enough of the plot mechanics that happen happen because your character makes choices you have to allow them to make the wrong choices it's agency if they make the wrong choice and then of course they're going to have to respond to it and fix things and that's what makes characters main characters feel more active and interesting but yeah it's definitely an amateur mistake that i see where essentially writers are afraid to dirty up their characters to make them really interesting and give them something to do so that is a ton of amateur writing mistakes the ones that i see crop up over and over again that i think if writers really think about these things if you go oh no i do that just work on that thing you'd be amazed how identifying and then working individually on these can improve your writing by leaps and bounds and it's not about going i'm terrible and i have to fix everything but taking things piecemeal so again i'm going to have links down below to several videos that are going to help you with these specific things because they are all fixable and they're not exhaustive so i want to know down below in the comments what are some amateur writing mistakes that you see that you have done yourself that you think are really important for people to know about so that they can improve their writing give this video a thumbs up if you like it i will make more kind of listicle style videos like this and if you're not are subscribed to the channel go ahead and do that i post new videos two to three times a week as always guys thank you so much for watching and happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 74,574

Rating: 4.9454241 out of 5

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, amateur writing, writing mistakes, amateur writing mistakes, amateur writing fixes, newbie writing mistakes, worst writing mistakes, worst amateur writing mistakes, novice writing, novice writing mistakes, bad writing

Id: yOQqxHKO-0w

Length: 37min 25sec (2245 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020