Common Mistakes

I get to read a lot of scripts. There are my own, the ones I see as an editor, the ones my students have written and the ones I see in various critique groups to which I belong. You begin to see a pattern. There are, in fact, four major faults that people make, and if they could do away with these mistakes, their work would improve vastly.

First, and this is undoubtedly the one that needs to be put right first, is that a story or a non-fiction piece lacks structure. The resolution may be unconvincing and too quickly exposed because clues haven’t been left throughout the text. Often, the story takes too long to get going. Sometimes, there is a jump straight from opening to climax.

Then there is all that telling instead of showing. This probably comes from a need to get the story down. This is fine – but it should only happen in the first draft. Just so that you know, I actually do fourteen drafts of my novels. In each draft I check for one thing. I have one check which involves seeing whether I am telling instead of showing. To show, you need to write with the senses, have dialogue, inner thoughts of characters – but not too many, and actions, and certainly no moralising.

A third fault is shifting point of view. Omniscient author is currently unfashionable, unless you actually make him / her another character, but even when it was in vogue, good writers stuck with that point of view. It really does prevent reader engagement if one flits around from consciousness to consciousness. Slightly more skilled writers do attempt to stay with one point of view, but sometimes slip into a neutral stance, which makes the narrative distance clunky.

The fourth fault is poorly constructed dialogue. Dialogue should sound natural but not actually be too natural. It should always show character or move the plot forward. Many novices produce cliché-ridden dialogue. Sometimes, also, a slightly more experienced writer will produce very good dialogue but which takes us nowhere. The writer has enjoyed themselves. Whilst this is a good exercise for the writing muscles, that particular piece of dialogue may have no place in that text. This is possibly a darling which needs killing.

Get those four faults under control and you’re a step nearer being published.

Killing Off Darlings

We are told to kill off our darlings, to get rid of that one beautiful piece of writing that shows the rest up. We really should edit out anything that doesn’t fit anyway. Every bit of prose should add to the plot, enhance setting or tell us more about the characters. It shouldn’t be there just for its own sake.
That it is there just for its own sake is what makes it a darling in the first place. As we create our darling, we are hung up on the writing itself. We want to show off the best of our skills. We create something which is superb, but sadly which does not fit the rest.
It is really this “not fitting the rest” which is why we have to kill it off. There are two ways to kill off a darling. Take it out, or make everything else match. If everything else becomes equally good, then the darling will not appear as a darling, but will just be part of a very rich text.
Then we may face the next problem. The text may become so rich that it is indigestible.
There is some hope in all of this. If a small piece of one of our works is superbly written and we are rather fond of it, but we need to take it out, we don’t have to get rid of it altogether. We might put it somewhere more appropriate. We might keep it for a rainy day. This is all so possible with modern IT.
Chances are, though, I suspect, that look at that particular darling again in six months time, and we might wonder how we ever managed to write it or become so fond of it in the first place.

Revisiting “Peace Child”

At last I have plucked up the courage to relook at the creative part of my Ph D thesis – this 100,000 word YA novel. One major change – and this was signalled up as being necessary by two of my readers, is to the title. I still keep the three titles for the three parts of the trilogy, but now have them in a different order. The Peace Child concept remains.
I’m now going through, reacting mainly to the comments of my external examiner, though my inner critic is doing a fair amount of work also. So, I’m strengthening two characters, making life harder for my protagonist, changing a major term, making a war look more like a war and addressing one or two anomalies which have crept in within the setting.
Once you’ve made the first cuts, it gets easier. I do have to be rigorous – akin to “Killing off darlings” in fact. I’m also hanging on to what both examiners said: that they do expect to see “Peace Child” published in the future. It is a case of really, “if you do A, B will happen”. The question is, can I do A?