Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.
I’m deviating from the prompt this week. The actual prompt was about book quotes, which is not something I’m very good at. I struggle remembering good quotes I read or even remembering quotes in general, so though I’d take a different angle and talk about some writing errors I see a lot, in both published books – whether it’s trad, self or indie – and through the editing work I do. Basically…it’s kind of an excuse for me to ‘flex’ my muscles a bit and talk about common things I see a lot that might put readers off. Feel free to tell me about things you notice in books in the comments, too. I’ll be sticking to five for this week.
Top Five Writing Errors and Mistakes
Telling
I often see pushback against the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule, and it usually demonstrates that the person ‘pushing back’ doesn’t understand what show, don’t tell means. It doesn’t mean always show, never tell. Instead, it’s shorthand for how we get the reader to engage with the text. Rather than having a paragraph detailing a conversation – “I saw Mary and she told me all about her neighbour and his new dog, the dog barks all night and day…”, we show it via dialogue –
“My neighbour has a new dog,” Mary said, sounding exhausted. “It barks. All day and night. Never shuts up.”
It’s also about how we convey emotions in writing. Telling someone he was angry, she was sad, I was excited, isn’t as impactful as showing someone is angry by the way their fists curl, or someone is sad by crying and so on. Showing how a character reacts and letting the reader infer their emotional state from that usually has more impact.
Exposition
Too many times, a writer leans hard into exposition, giving the reader a chunk of information that does little for characterisation or plot. It especially seems to happen at the start of a book. There’s multiple problems with this: info-dumping can mean the reader struggles to identify the important versus not important information, where there’s too much it can open up too many questions that aren’t answered by the writer, and it hugely slows the pace down. We don’t need to know everything about this world in the first few pages, and again, show, don’t tell – the world should be shown to the reader through the character’s eyes, rather than the reader told about it.
Flat Characters
I really struggle to engage with books where characters fall flat, where they read more as archetypes or like they have one specific role in the story and there’s never even a hint they could deviate from that. It’s when they feel like there is no life for them outside the plot, or where the characters come across as stiff and unrealistic.
Backstory
Yes, there should be backstory to the book – why the characters are in whatever situation they’re in at the becoming, previous events that have shaped them into the person they are in the book, maybe it’s larger world changes that impact how the novel unfolds – writers need to be aware of all this, but what information filters through to the reader needs to be carefully considered. it’s a delicate balance, and sometimes it stands out when the writer has gone too far in either direction – we might get a chunk of backstory at the beginning (linking in with exposition), or the plot itself comes to a standstill to tell us what happened to the character x years ago or why this world is the way it is, or (and this one links into Flat Characters) there’s been no consideration to this at all and it comes through in how ill thought out the characters and world are.
Filler
Filler words. Filler, filler, everywhere – and they add nothing! When a book is littered with these, it makes for a difficult reading experience, and really starts to stand out. Filler words are commonly used words that don’t add anything to the sentence, and by removing them, the sentence doesn’t lose anything, in fact it becomes more crisp and tight. Examples are that, and then, began to/started to, and telling words like I heard, I saw, I knew, etc.
So, what are the things that stand out to you when you’re reading, that get on your nerves? What sort of writerly habits do you wish more writers would avoid?
Unwrapping Words 