10 Mistakes Writers Don’t See
Posted on May 3, 2007 by Elizabeth
A classic column from Pat Holt of Holt Uncensored: Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do).
The list also could be called, “10 COMMON PROBLEMS THAT DISMISS YOU AS AN AMATEUR,” because these mistakes are obvious to literary agents and editors, who may start wording their decline letter by page 5. What a tragedy that would be.
Here’s the list in brief. Be sure to read the entire column when you have time. This stuff is simple but very useful.
- Repeats — leaning on “crutch” words.
- Flat writing
- Empty adverbs — “They suck the meaning out of every sentence. “
- Phony dialogue — “ Be careful of using dialogue to advance the plot.”
- No-good suffixes — -ness, -ize, -ingly.
- The “to be” words.
- Lists.
- Telling rather than showing.
- Awkward phrasing.
- Commas — Their use and misuse. “Entire books have been written about punctuation. Get one.”
Yes. Amen!
I agree with most of these. However, I don’t quite understand ” Be careful of using dialogue to advance the plot.”.
As a general rule, you want to avoid using dialogue to tell the reader something the characters already know. Here’s how Holt puts it:
‘Be careful of using dialogue to advance the plot. Readers can tell when characters talk about things they already know, or when the speakers appear to be having a conversation for our benefit. You never want one character to imply or say to the other, “Tell me again, Bruce: What are we doing next?”‘
I love these rules. I am an adverb using girl, so I will stop sucking the life out of sentences. However, what is flat writing?
Flat writing is nothing fancy, just writing that is blah. Holt’s examples (http://www.holtuncensored.com/ten_mistakes.html):
“He wanted to know but couldn’t understand what she had to say, so he waited until she was ready to tell him before asking what she meant.”
Something is conveyed in this sentence, but who cares? The writing is so flat, it just dies on the page. You can’t fix it with a few replacement words - you have to give it depth, texture, character. Here’s another:
“Bob looked at the clock and wondered if he would have time to stop for gas before driving to school to pick up his son after band practice.” True, this could be important - his wife might have hired a private investigator to document Bob’s inability to pick up his son on time - and it could be that making the sentence bland invests it with more tension. (This is the editorial consultant giving you the benefit of the doubt.) Most of the time, though, a sentence like this acts as filler. It gets us from A to B, all right, but not if we go to the kitchen to make a sandwich and find something else to read when we sit down.
I know I have words I use repeatedly. However, while I’m writing the first drafts I just type it until I can find another word that means just what I need in the sentence. But, I usually highlight them in the manuscript so I know I have to edit there.
I notice repeated words in other people’s writing. I would probably need someone else to read through my manuscript and point them out.
Similarly, when I submit a piece to my critique group they’ll often notice that I’ve used the same sentence structure repeatedly.
Elizabeth - thanks for clearing that up. That makes sense and is not what I thought the author was talking about.
>“He wanted to know but couldn’t understand what she had to say, so he waited until she was ready to tell him before asking what she meant.”
It doesn’t even make sense. If she’s ready to tell him, he doesn’t need to ask her. On the other hand, how would he know she was ready unless he asked her? I would add to Holt’s list:
* Decide what it is you’re trying to say and say it.
In this case the writer probably means either that he didn’t understand her, but, for fear of looking like a dolt, didn’t ask her to explain, or that he didn’t understand and would wait until later to ask her, or both. All of these are easy to say, once you work out in your mind what it is you really want to say.
“Oh yeah, I get it,” he said. But he didn’t.
or:
He hadn’t the slightest clue what she was talking about. But he’d sooner die than let her know it.
or:
She wasn’t making any sense at all. He made a note to point that out to her later, when it would be too late for her to recover. That would burn.
In all those counterexamples, you inject a little conflict and emotional tone — exactly what the original example lacked. Would it be helpful to ask ourselves, What does the character want here? Why can’t he/she get it? How does he/she feel about it?
Of course, in a first draft there are likely to be a lot of flat passages serving as placeholders until we can go back and answer those questions.
Good point. The soon-to-be-sainted Vonnegut made a good point: if it doesn’t advance the story or reveal the character, cut it.
Though even if it does, it shouldn’t be “flat,” that is, “dull.” Case in point:
>“Bob looked at the clock and wondered if he would have time to stop for gas before driving to school to pick up his son after band practice.”
Why is this important? What happens if he doesn’t get gas? Perhaps in this story the turning point comes at the gas station, a robbery goes wrong, the stray bullet catches a pump, and Bob is horribly burned, all because his watch was slow. So this sentence is important. For the rest of his life Bob will think about that moment when he checked his watch. If only it had been accurate! So, if that’s the story, then enfuse that moment with the emotion that will haunt Bob afterward:
Bob checked his watch. Just enough time to stop for gas before picking up Billy. Anyway, he could be a few minutes late. Billy always was. Traffic was a nightmare! There’s an Exxon on the way. He could use his SpeedGas doodad. It was on the right side too. In and out in two minutes flat.
If only.
I LOVE lists. I love to read lists. I love to write lists. I refuse to stop!
Oh, Catherine, please stop! I once had a woman in a writing group that made lists upon lists upon lists in her writing. After explaining to her why it didn’t work in the stories she wrote, she still didn’t stop making the lists in her prose. We all just stopped pointing it out to her. In dialog, the lists are fine. We do talk that way. But, oh, try, try to stop the lists.
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are full of lists. But they’re ingenious and hysterical. It all depends.
I couldn’t get through those books. Maybe I’ll have to try to read them again.
[...] References: “10 golden lessons from Steve Jobs” available at the Ririan Project. - Link originally found at Brad Barbour’s blog. “10 Mistakes Writers Don’t See” originally found at Charlottesville Words [...]
I haven’t had the courage to tackle FW yet, but Ulysses is a lot of fun.
My lists are strings of jewels.
Ezekiel 28:13
13Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.
–If it’s good enough for Ezekiel, it’s good enough for me.
Well, then, list away. Who can argue with Ezekiel? Not me.
Oh, wait! I forgot something. I watched a movie last night with the subtitles on so that I wouldn’t wake the kids. There were so many misused adverbs that I was distracted from the plot. I kept thinking, “Why didn’t someone catch this?”
Misused how? Were they in the dialogue, or transcribed imcorrectly into the subtitles?
They weren’t transcribed incorrectly. The adverbs were over used and not used to modify verbs.
1. i like this site
2. i like the content
3. i like the comments
4. i like the layout
5. i like the blog title
6. i like the header art
7. i think you forgot the overuse of “quotes”
8. i vow to stop using lists
nice list
Ha! Thanks, Charles. I was reading “something” today, I don’t remember “what” it was, but there were so many “quotes” in it that I finally “gave up.”
Probably one of the texts I had to read for my class on racism–god forbid the reader thinks you actually believe “that”!
Can we make these “rules” apply to blog “entries” as well?
And “comments”?
Ah, if we ruled the world . . .
Look at what I “started”…im so “sorry”…