4 Mistakes I Made in My 4th Manuscript

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”

— Philip Roth

Looking at your writing with a fresh eye can help you find mistakes you never noticed before. When you look back on your writing, you start to see all the faults. Instead of camping out in a dark corner, start fixing them.

How long have you been writing?

I started when I was extremely young — all the way back in 2004 when I was naught but a preteen and had absolutely no formal writing education.

I finished my first manuscript in 2004, the second, and the third in 2006. This fourth one wasn’t loosely finished until 2009 or 2010. I started to learn a bit more about writing in high school since I took as many writing and literature courses as I possibly could, but I was still a novice.

I danced the tango with that fourth book all through college, trying to resurrect it into something decent. I’ve sat down to work on it many different times in the last few years and each time, I find a new, horrible mistake I need to correct.

1. Drop the horribly cliched beginning.

First, there was a prologue. The prologue was a flash-forward to when the book finally gets exciting in the third chapter. However, it’s pretty ambiguously a flash-forward, because then the first chapter begins with the main character waking up. Subsequently, it makes the prologue seem like a dream.

That means I had two cardinal sins in the first three pages — a cliche dream beginning and a cliche main character waking up beginning. Scary.

There are a lot of different ways you can start your book. If done brilliantly well, satirically, or in an inventive way, a “cliche” beginning can possibly work, but it’s not easy. You can invert tropes or turn them upside down to make them interesting, but personally, I’m just a lot more comfortable abandoning them completely.

Writer's Digest put together a list of 12 cliches to avoid beginning your story with. It's easy to miss some cliches, especially if you're new to reading a lot and diving into the literary world. As you read more, you start to see these repeating beginnings, and realize they're too cliche.

To fix this problem, I dropped the flash-forward, I dropped the waking up nonsense, and expedited things so that the story gets interesting in the first chapter, not the third.

2. Okay, we’re talking. Okay, we’re describing. Wait…what was the point of all this exposition?

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

― Jack Kerouac

Novels are long and give you room to make some mistakes. Short stories are far more unforgiving since you have much less space and opportunity to have something that isn’t quite perfect.

Regardless, I’d like to emphasize that you can only make some mistakes in a novel. It is a long work, but you should still put all of your scenes and chapters under the microscope when you’re editing.

Does every single scene contribute to the plot, world-building, or character development in some way? Are any scenes just a bit boring to read?

You have to be harsh sometimes when you’re looking at your writing, especially if it’s a few years old. It’s hard to decide whether you should edit, rewrite, or shelf your dusty old novel, but you’ve got to be honest with yourself about your older work.

My first three manuscripts are shelved. They are on the shelf and they are never going to see the light of day again. This fourth one is on the fence; honestly, I should probably shelf it. However, there are some decent aspects of it despite the critical flaws, so I’m stubbornly rewriting major portions of it and editing everything.

3. Identify and eliminate anachronisms — technology lot changes in 10 years.

Depending on your genre, this might not apply to you. If you’re writing something taking place in the past, you probably won’t run into this issue.

However, with contemporary fiction, you need to be careful. You don’t realize how much things change in a decade until you reference technology that has absolutely no business being in your story. Here’s a sloppy mistake I somehow left in this story even after I started heavily editing and rewriting it.

“She grabbed her cell phone off her desk and pocketed it, not bothering to glance at the exterior screen.”

The exterior screen. Exterior. Screen.

Do you know what that means? It’s been so long, it took me a moment. Then I remembered that I wrote this story in the era of flip phones and that my main character had a flip phone. The most galling part of this anachronism is that she’s supposed to be a somewhat techy person. Because a techy person in 2019 would totally have a flip phone. Sure. That makes a ton of sense!

Scorching sarcasm aside, just watch out for anachronisms. If you’ve been working on something for a very long time, they could be hiding anywhere. Your situation in your writing might not be as extreme as this one, but the rapid change of technology is something you should keep in mind if you’re writing contemporary fiction.

Let’s say it takes you two years of querying to get your novel published. If technology is referenced in your book to any notable extent, it would be wise to give it a read through even if it’s edited to perfection. One or two years going by might make some technology references out of date.

4. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No…it’s a seventh narrator!

It’s not a bad thing to have multiple narrators. Even New York Times bestselling authors like Pierce Brown have added additional narrators as he has expanded his Red Rising trilogy. However, you can have too many narrators in your story.

I used to be guilty of having far too many narrators, not making it clear who was narrating, and writing a lot of short scenes.

When I look at my older work, I’m almost horrified to realize how much it plays out like a movie or other visual media, where you can pop into someone else’s perspective briefly without it being too jarring to your audience. Unfortunately, the way I was writing didn’t accomplish this at all.

However many narrators you have in your book, take a good look at them and make sure they’re all essential.

You also want to ask yourself if having multiple narrators serves your book. Since I have a better understanding of how to build suspense now, I’ve opted to take some of my multiple point of view stories and change them to a single, limited POV rather than using an omniscient narrator or multiple narrators.

It can be a lot more interesting for your reader if they’re just as curious or uncertain as your narrator is in certain situations.

Here’s an example; let’s say you’re writing a romance. Your protagonist isn’t sure how the love interest feels about them. If you switch POVs between the protagonist and love interest, your reader is probably going to know exactly how both characters feel.

Instead of being curious to see if the love interest does reciprocate your protagonist’s feelings, they’re just going to be frustrated waiting for the two romantic fools to confess to each other.

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.

Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

― William Faulkner