In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns outlines half-a-dozen common mistakes he sees time and time again in the manuscripts of aspiring authors.
These mistakes are so common, in fact, that he made every single one of them himself while drafting his first novel.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #165 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #165 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns.
Here’s what I want you to do: head on to my website and get a copy of my book, Novel Advice, totally free; it’s on me. It’ll get you on my mailing list, and you’ll never miss an episode of The Writing Coach podcast, and you’ll get to hear about all the different workshops, programs, and courses that I always have going on throughout the year.
In this episode of the podcast, we are going to look at common mistakes that I see aspiring authors making all the time. But we’re going to do a twist on it. So often, I’m teaching writer’s craft, and I’m correcting a mistake or a misstep that an author has made, and I say to them, “Hey, I made that same mistake when I was writing my first book.” So today, we’re going to cover these common mistakes that I see again and again and again, but every single one of them that we’re going to touch on is a mistake that I made or a challenge that I had when going through the process of writing and publishing my first book.
POINT OF VIEW
Now, the first thing we’re going to talk about is point of view.
I sat down and wrote my first novel. I had multiple characters, and throughout the story, I was head-hopping from one character’s thoughts to another character’s thoughts. I had never given point of view particular thought before. I was writing my manuscript the way we see a movie, only where we can go into each character’s head.
And so, of course, at some point, I connected with another author in my area, we did a manuscript exchange, and the very first thing she said to me when we sat down for some coffee to discuss each other’s manuscripts was: “You know you’re head-hopping throughout the book, right?”
I said to her, “Am I not allowed to do that?”
I had a master’s degree in English Literature. I had spent years studying writing and books and novels and literature, and yet no one had ever taught me point of view.
And this is what I see time and time and time again. Almost every single time I’m reading a new writer’s manuscript, someone coming to work with me, or they’re providing me with pages for review or whatnot, the very first question I ask myself is, “What point of view is this written in?” And “Is it being used correctly?” It’s not most of the time. Instead, it’s written in the exact same POV I used, which is this quasi-third person limited that also head hops and goes omniscient whenever the author feels like it should or wants it to. It really creates a mess of a manuscript.
So the first major lesson I learned writing a book and the first writer’s craft technique that I really needed to study and understand and lockdown was point of view.
If you’re listening this and perhaps you’re working on your first manuscript, you’ve got to ask yourself, “Am I writing in omniscient?” which I don’t recommend. It’s, at this point, a largely outdated mode of narration. Almost all of our contemporary fiction is written in either third person limited or first person. But if you are using omniscient, are you actually, or are you just using it as an excuse to head hop?
And, if you’re writing third person, are you actually locking down into a single character’s POV for any given scene? Or are you doing things like switching POV narrators mid-scene?
All of these are things you need to understand, and make sure that you’re totally clear on what the rules are before you start breaking them. And I promise you, once you do understand point of view and lock it down, your story is going to improve immensely. Taking something that is quasi-omniscient and turning it into a close third-person limited narrative is going to make your book so much better. It brings the reader so much closer to your characters. And it really just gives that modern voice to the narration. So I was there. I had to learn the hard knocks of point of view just like everyone else.
TOO MANY IDEAS
Another problem I often see is that writers have too many ideas for a single book. In popular culture, we always hear about “writer’s block this” and “writer’s block that.” But what is way, way more common in the creative community is writers who just can’t stop. They have so many ideas that they want to get into their book, and as a consequence, there is all sorts of fallout. The narrative becomes so muddled because the book doesn’t really seem to be about any one thing because it’s got so much in it. The word count just spirals and spirals and spirals. And then you get into these situations where writers come to me looking for support, and they have 180,000-word manuscript that now they need to revise and ideally pare down until it’s actually at a publishable length.
Or what happens even more often is that writers are rushing through their scenes; they have so many scenes that they want to get into their book that they’re not giving any single scene room to breathe. You get these manuscripts with 90 different scenes, and each of them is only 500 words long. And when you’re jumping from scene to scene to scene, the reader has such a hard time situating themselves environmentally, and chronologically, and it’s so difficult to emotionally empathize with a story that’s moving at that pace.
And what ends up happening most of the time, when I’m working with these writers who are coming in with so many ideas, is that they probably have a trilogy worth of ideas that they’re trying to get into one story.
And that’s what happened with me. I was writing this super long, overblown manuscript. It was too long, but I had so much story I wanted to tell. I was rushing through scenes so that I could make everything fit. And finally, one day, I said to myself, “You know what? This is a trilogy of books. There is just way too much content here.”
What was originally just act one of my manuscript became my first novel. The Page Turners: Blood, the first book in the trilogy, was originally just act one.
And so I was there. I’ve been there. I know you go in so ambitious and with so many ideas, but the reality is that a book can only contain so much information and so much story.
Modern readers today are not looking to read a 200,000-word epic from a first-time novelist. And the longer your book gets, the more difficult everything becomes. Revisions take so much longer because there are just so many chapters to go through. Hiring an editor or a coach becomes so much more expensive because you have so much content for them to go through. If you can really trim your story down and really focus on one or two key ideas per book, it’s going to be so much more effective.
That’s what I did. That’s what I end up encouraging a lot of my clients to do, It allows scenes to breathe. It allows you to actually get into every scene and make it meaningful and powerful and dramatic and emotional, instead of just rushing on to the next scene.
TOO MANY CHARACTERS
Similar to this idea of too many ideas, too many story concepts, I often see manuscripts with way too many characters or even manuscripts that don’t have an identified protagonist; there is no one character leading the story.
And, of course, that is what I did in my first book, that first giant manuscript had three leads. And I thought the first act, which ended up becoming the first book, would kind of be one character’s story. And the second one would be kind of the other characters’ story. And the third one would be kind of the other character story. But again, all of them were POV narrators, they all had their own storylines, and none of them really was differentiated in a way that made them absolutely the lead. There ended up being a supporting character who became nearly as important as everyone else. And as I’ve written the trilogy, the cast of characters has just continued to grow and grow. Maybe we can call this Georgia RR Martin syndrome.
Stories really work best or resonate with the largest audience when we have a key protagonist, when we have that lead character who the reader can empathize with and relate to and whose story we can really follow.
And so in the same way that most writers come in with too many ideas, just like I did, they often come in with too many characters like I did, or not identifying that one lead character, that one Harry Potter, that one Luke Skywalker, that character who takes the narrative and whom we follow from beginning to end.
THE GENRE MASHUP
Next up is the genre mashup.
I was a huge fan of comic books. I was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and what I loved about the medium of superhero comics and the show Buffy is that the villains in any different episode or issue would come from different genres. So you know, Spider-man might fight a wizard one episode, a mutant monster the next, and a robot the next, and the same thing with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I loved that feeling of the genre mashup, so when I sat down to write my first novel, when I sat down to write what became The Page Turners trilogy, I wanted to do a sci-fi, horror, fantasy mashup of my favorite genres, those commercial genres. And then also layering on to that, I wanted it to be quasi-literary fiction. I wanted it to be like a sci-fi horror fantasy mashup as written by Virginia Woolf.
I love the ambition of first-time authors. And obviously, I love a genre mashup. That said, there’s a certain arrogance that comes into this idea that I’m going to write my first novel, and I’m also going to just knock it out of the park with multiple different genres.
There’s a reason why Stephen King is primarily a horror writer. There’s a reason why James Patterson is primarily a thriller writer. There’s a reason why those lawyer books are written by lawyers. And there’s a reason Michael Crichton has science and all of his books. It’s not just about marketing. You’ll hear book marketing coaches say, “You’ve got to pick one genre and stick with it because readers read within that genre.” I don’t think it’s just about that. I think it’s about mastery.
If you are really going to master an art form, go all in. I so wish I had just said, “I’m going to be a horror writer” or “I’m going to be a sci-fi writer,” instead of trying to master horror, master sci-fi, and master fantasy all at once. While also mastering writer’s craft and mastering the idea of the mashup and pushing it all together.
Can it work? Does it work?
Absolutely.
But for a first-time novelist, I really ask you to think about the genre of your book and really see if you can at least meet the expectations of that genre. Because every time you layer on a new genre, you’re layering on a whole new list of expectations and conventions and obligatory scenes that readers of that genre are going to be looking for.
When I went in and wrote my third novel to take a break from The Page Turners, it was largely just a thriller. It was an action thriller. I wasn’t mashing up a ton of different things. And in my opinion, it was so much easier and also so much more effective to really pick a genre and live inside of it, and try to master it and try to give the readers of that type of story exactly what they want.
SELF-CONSCIOUS WRITING
Now, I mentioned briefly earlier, this idea that I wanted The Page Turners to be pulp fiction meets literary fiction; a crappy comic book meets a modernist novel. And part of that, I think, and it’s something I see a lot, again, with beginning authors, is the authors can be really self-conscious about their own writing. I feel like sometimes, when I go back and look at that first novel of mine, I can see myself trying to impress the reader. I really wanted the reader to say, “Wow, this guy can write!”
The reality is that when the reader thinks about you and your writing, they’ve taken a step outside the story. In my opinion, the best commercial fiction happens when the author disappears, and the reader just completely loses themselves in the story.
And I think so often writers, beginner writers especially, spend time thinking, “Oh, what’s the reader going to think about me? If I write some really weird thing in my story, are they going to think I’m weird? If I don’t write these beautiful poetic sentences, are they going to think I’m not a good writer?”
What I’ve learned over the course of my career, and what I tell the clients that I work with, is the reader isn’t thinking about you. It’s not about you. They’re there to be entertained. They’re there to read an exciting story that’s hopefully similar to a story that they’ve read before and really enjoyed, but is also unique and different enough to give them that excitement of something new.
I really encourage beginner authors to let go of trying to prove themselves to anyone as a writer, unless you’re writing literary fiction, but I think most of the real listeners of the show, and most of the clients I work with are writing commercial genre fiction, and what is commercial genre fiction about? It’s about storytelling, it’s about excitement, and drama, and violence and sex. And you know, sometimes it doesn’t need to be written with the most beautiful sentences ever. So loosen up a bit on your prose and focus on what’s going to make the best story experience for your readers.
TOO CLOSE TO HOME
In the final mistake here, I will talk about that again, I see it all the time, and sometimes it’s conscious, and sometimes it’s not. In my case, it was conscious. I based a lot of The Page Turners trilogy, on myself, and my youth. I grew up in a small town, and the kids in the book grew up in a small town. I dealt with bullies, and the kids deal with bullies. I had a stepfather that I did not get along with, and the characters experienced divorce and experienced step-parents that they don’t get along with. A lot of the trauma, honestly, of my youth, I worked into that story.
I think I thought it was probably going to be a cathartic experience. We hear a lot about journaling and about how writing things down can help heal trauma. But I eventually found that drawing from my own life experiences just stirred up bad feelings and bad emotions and traumas of youth. It didn’t heal it. I mean, maybe it feels good that I least took bad things that happened to me and turned it into exciting stories for someone else. But the point is, I think that writing a story is not going to heal trauma; it’s totally unrelated.
If you have bad things that happened to you in the past, there are a lot of methodologies for dealing with that, including therapy. But I don’t think just writing a vampire novel about anybody’s going to solve anything, and in fact, might make it worse.
I said I was kind of doing it consciously. I also see a lot of writers doing it unconsciously. And it’s blatantly obvious to me, even if it isn’t obvious to them, that they are writing their own story and that their protagonist in their manuscript is so clearly them and based on them based on their experiences.
There is a certain value in drawing on the authenticity of lived experience when crafting fiction. That said, I would encourage you to step back from yourself. I think most novelists’ first books are just way too close to home, way too close to the great things and the horrible things that happened to them.
It makes it really difficult to get perspective on your work. If someone like an editor or coach comes along and says, “Oh, your protagonist is really unlikeable,” well, if that character is you, suddenly you take that personally. Even though we’re just talking about what is supposed to be a fictional character, suddenly, it feels like you or your experiences or your life are under attack.
Something I did with my third novel, M School, was I just tried to write about a character who was as far away from me as possible. I’m a man,I made her a woman. I’m a super kind of emotional guy. I made her a sociopath. I just intentionally wanted to write about someone who wasn’t me. And in fact, early on in the book, I think in the first chapter, my character looks out a window, and she and her friend insult a kind of outsider guy. There’s kind of like a punky emo kid, and they’re like, “Oh, look at this loser over here.” And I mean, that’s me. I’m that punk emo kid. I was clearly trying to write about girl who might point at me and go, “Oh, look at this, you know, Emo nerd over here.”
It was really fun and really freeing. I could have that character do anything. I didn’t have to reflect on “Oh, are people going to think I’m weird? Are people going to think I’m uninteresting?” Because it wasn’t me. It was a character I was writing about.
So that’s kind of the final mistake or kind of self-created challenge that I see so many writers go through and that I went through as well: just making that first book too close to home. And whether you’re doing that consciously or unconsciously, stop and ask yourself, is this really a fictional story that I’m telling? Or is this my story? Is this my life? It might it be more effective to distance yourself from your characters in your story, and really treat it as a work of art instead of treating it as a part of your traumatic healing process that, you know, we all have. We all have challenges in our past and maybe writing an alien abduction story isn’t the best way of dealing with that. It wasn’t for me, I don’t think so.
There we have it, folks, these are just the things I see coming up time and time again, with the aspiring authors and beginning authors that I work with. I just wanted to share with all of you that it’s so common, I see these mistakes again, and again and again. And more important of all, or, in addition, I’ve been there, I did it. I head hopped into my first draft of my manuscript. I had way too many ideas. I had a trilogy worth of ideas, I was trying to get into one story. I didn’t have one main protagonist, I had three protagonists. I had too many characters and didn’t have that one key character that the reader could identify with. Rather than trying to master a single genre and really deliver on the genre conventions of a single genre, I did this mash-up making things more complicated for myself and my readers. I was too self-conscious of a writer. I was focused on trying to prove how good a writer I was, instead of just focusing on telling the best story possible. And I think I just drew too much from my own life and my own experiences. And I think it would have been a more enjoyable and more fun first book if it had been about people much more different than me and in different situations than something so close to home because that can be a painful process.
All right, that is it for this episode. Have you made any of these mistakes? Have you had these challenges come up in your writing? Are you dealing with any of them right now? Let me know, I’d love to hear from you.
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