Beginner writer mistakes I made (so you don’t have to)

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Learning to write great stories is a process, and a part of that process is making mistakes that you can learn from later on. Or, if you’re lucky, someone else has already made the mistakes and they show you how you can avoid them yourself.

If you’ve already made some of these common beginner writer mistakes, there’s no need to feel bad! Knowing you have something to improve is the first step to becoming really good and saying goodbye to sloppy writing.

So what are these mistakes to avoid in writing your novel and how can you fix them?

The WORST beginner writer mistake: Your story lacks a clear plot

A lack of proper plot is what often happens when you have one, cool idea, perhaps a plot event or a character, and you just start writing without a plan. Unless you’re a very experienced writer, that’s rarely a good idea if you’re trying to write an entire novel.

Stories are about solving a single, big problem. There definitely are other problems over the course of the story, but story isn’t about them. And what that problem does is ask a question. When that specific question is answered, the story is essentially over. Will Katniss get out of the Hunger Games alive? Will Rose and Jack’s love survive? Will Elizabeth and Mr Darcy get over their differences?

If your story doesn’t pose a question and then answer it, you just have a bunch of events in your hands but not a proper plot. If you end up answering a different question altogether, your readers will be confused at best and pretty miffed a worst. This is the bare minimum of planning you need to do if you want to write a good story.

How to fix a flabby plot

Plan, plan, plan. Use some of my methods of outlining to hash out your story before you start writing it so that you won’t get lost and end up with a mish-mash of random plot events and characters that don’t go together.

The most important thing to remember is cause and effect. You don’t have a story if your events don’t have anything to do with each other. If you’ve got an end result in mind, you can also work backwards from it to figure out what should happen first.

I get it, figuring out what should happen in your story and then putting all those events together is not easy if you’ve never done it before. Fortunately, I know exactly how to do that, and you can learn all about turning your characters into plot fuel and writing an outline that does its job in the Genius Plotting System.

Alternatively, if you don’t feel like you need extra help with your plotting, you could get this popular novel outline template or just learn how to find your plot with the Troublemaker Method I created.

Starting your story with a character waking up

Unless your character wakes up with the ceiling caving in or something else dramatic, there’s nothing interesting about hearing your alarm clock and getting out of bed. The very first lines of your story should hook your reader in and have them wondering what’s going to happen next. But also, you should have them wondering what was happening right before the story started. That’s why you need to start where things are already happening.

Now you’re probably saying that you have read books, good books even, that start with someone waking up. And you’re right, but if those were truly good books, they did have the reader asking questions and provided important information about the story or characters. Here’s how Hunger Games starts:

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My finger’s stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover.

Why is the other side cold? What’s the significance of that? Oh, so the narrator is looking for someone who probably means a lot to them, and they’re sleeping in pretty rough conditions.

See? That’s already a lot of meaning and information in just two sentences. You don’t get that with “He woke up when the alarm clock rang. He was going to be late for work again.”

Mind you, it’s more than okay to write something like that in the first draft. That’s just you telling yourself the story, and it’s perfectly fine and maybe even encouraged to spell it out for your own sake. But when you’re writing the version of the story that other people are going to read, they don’t need to hear about anything that isn’t actually relevant to the story itself. Generally, we all start the day by waking up, and if your character is already going about their business, we assume they’ve woken up as well.

How to fix your character waking up

You should start your story as late as possible and end it as soon as possible, though that’s sometimes easier said than done.

Considering what your story is actually about, would it be a big deal if you started your story 36 hours later? Three days later? A week later? Keep shaving off days until you find yourself saying “no, it wouldn’t make sense anymore” and track back to where it starts to make sense. That’s the right place to begin your story.

Outlining helps here too, because when you have a bird’s eye view of your story, you know exactly where it needs to start and end. It’s like having a map that you can refer to instead of being dropped into the middle of nowhere like you’re in Geoguesser. Understanding story structure is crucial here, which is what my outline template and this super simple plotting sheet make use of.

There’s no conflict in the story

Without conflict, there’s no story, but it isn’t enough to just have one big conflict – you have to have several mini conflicts along the way if you want to keep your reader interested. But what is conflict? Essentially, there are two forces with their own goals, and they clash. (You can read this post for more conflict ideas.)

Conflicts can be anything from “Izzie wants to get married but there are no single people in her small village” (this is Izzie vs. her surroundings) to “John wants to become the best doctor in the hospital but this guy Ted keeps sabotaging him” (John vs. Ted) or even “there is only one habitable country left in the world and the protagonist must get their family there no matter what it takes” (protagonist vs. climate disaster).

Let’s get back to Hunger Games. The big conflict in the story is that Katniss needs to make it through the Hunger Games alive. But does she just kill everyone else right off the bat and then win the whole thing? Of course not. All kinds of obstacles bring more conflicts along the way and the other tributes nearly get her several times. There are wasps. Rue dies. And although Katniss does get a few wins along the way, they never come easily.

One of the biggest beginner writer mistakes is being too kind to your characters – you have to make them work for their victory. An easy way to do this is to list all your conflict ideas in the brainstorming phase and use them when you’re writing your story.

In dystopian worlds and horror stories, it’s easy to find ways to bring in conflict, but it’s crucial for other kinds of stories, too. All of them. Romance novels are often about X wanting to get together with Y, but if that happens too early on with no additional conflict, the rest of the story is essentially pointless. Maybe Rose agrees to go out with Julie only one quarter into the story and the date goes really well and there’s no additional conflict between them, then what? Maybe Julie gets a job offer that would force her to move continents. Maybe Rose’s family doesn’t approve of Julie because she isn’t Jewish.

At the root of conflict should be something important that your character wants. If there were nothing there, it would be simple to just walk away, and if your main character walks away from you, you have no story left. Yikes!

There also need to be multiple obstacles along the way, because without conflict, it really won’t matter that much when your characters get to live happily ever after at the end of the story, and what’s more, your story will be over far too soon and your characters can’t go through meaningful change. Don’t worry, you’ll find out how to fix this next.

How to fix having no conflict in your story

If you’ve already written your story and there’s no conflict, I’m afraid that you’re going to do a whole lot of rewriting.

Think about movies and books you love. What is the big problem, also known as the main conflict, in those stories? Make a list. Then look at your own story idea and come up with possible Big Problems for your story. How, though? You need to look at your protagonist and give them problems that hurt them personally. They need flaws and existing problems that complicate matters and that make your readers say ouch.

The problems aren’t there just for decoration, they’re the most important material of your plot. If you’ve got characters but not much plot to speak of, my Troublemaker Method can help you fix that easily.

Looking at story structure when you’re planning your story usually also helps you overcome this issue as well. Get back to the drawing board and plan your story from the beginning including plenty of meaningful conflict.

As for adding the smaller conflicts along the way, it’s easy to do that when you look at your scenes. Your POV character enters each scene with a goal, and more of than not, you should say NO to them, or at least YES, BUT. It’s other characters, the environment and the POV character’s own past and current mistakes that cause these obstacles. Getting to their ultimate goal should never be a straight line, it should be a messy wiggle.

Obviously you could plan your scenes in your favourite notebook, but I also have this Notion scene planner and the Notion novel planner, as well as the Google Docs scene planner for you digital plotters.

There are no stakes in your story

If your story makes the reader say “so what?” and you can’t answer, it could be that your stakes are too low. Or maybe you’re writing about the apocalypse, but we have no reason to care because you haven’t made it personal. Essentially, your story needs public AND private stakes.

If you’re wondering what stakes are, you just have to think about what does your character have to lose if they don’t reach their goal. If Katniss doesn’t get out of Hunger Games alive, she will, well, die, but also her family will lose her, and we’ve already been shown how she needs to be there to look after her sister and hunt things. If Katniss hadn’t volunteered to go instead of her sister, we might not care about her fate quite so much and her life wouldn’t matter much more than the other tributes’.

Your character should always have some kind of a problem, and the reality of that problem is that it’s been going on way before the story started, whether the character realises it or not. They desperately need to be able to fix it because the problem is more or less ruining their life. It might not always be obvious or dramatic, but it’s true. Shallow Hal was already shallow and lacking a meaningful romantic relationship when the story started. Harry Potter already was Voldemort’s enemy although he didn’t know it himself. Elle Woods didn’t quite believe in herself.

Your reader needs to know how so very important it is that your character gets their sh*t together and solves their problems the right way. You don’t need to spell it out, and possibly shouldn’t, but you do need to make it matter. Make your readers care. And show it straight away.

How to fix low or no stakes

Ask yourself the question: what’s going to happen if your protagonist doesn’t reach their goal? Then answer it. Keep writing reasons after another until you can’t think any more. If any of those things are meaningful, show them in your story, too.

If you can’t think of anything? Well, back to the drawing board, young lady. What kind of life goals does your protagonist have? What’s important to them? What kind of life is waiting for them if they fail? Good character creation is the key to good plots, because full and complex people will always act and react somehow instead of just standing there passively.

So when you’ve got a massive global or even just national or village-wide problem, think of how it’s particularly bad for your specific character and how it’s impeding their personal plans. And when you’ve got tiny, personal problems, think of how they can either have bigger consequences or be tied to larger-scale problems.

Including scenes “just because”

Every scene should take the story forward and bring us vital information about the characters or the story world. I know it’s fun to get carried away and write a scene where the characters go to Tesco or have a sleepover with a dragon and not much happens, but those scenes need to be weeded out if they don’t actually have an important purpose in the story. These scenes are also known as filler scenes.

The importance isn’t necessarily that a lot of stuff happens to further the plot. Your characters could be learning important information or skills that come useful later on or we might be learning something impotant about your characters or settings. If you can remove a scene and it doesn’t affect your readers’ understanding of your story at all, you don’t need that scene.

Mind you, it doesn’t have to be obvious straight away why the scene or the information provided is important. But it DOES need to come up later on. You might not consciously realise it, but readers assume everything in the story is relevant. As the old saying goes, if you introduce a gun at the beginning of the story, it needs to be shot before the story ends. (Likewise, if someone is going to get shot, you’d better be showing that gun well before it’s actually needed!)

When I read Jane Austen’s Emma for the first time, I was kind of annoyed by this scene where they’re talking about someone’s dream in great detail, but later it turned out that it was very relevant after all. (I can’t quite remember how it went so I’ll make sure to update this paragraph one day after rereading the book.)

How to fix filler scenes

First, you have to evaluate each of your scenes. What is the purpose of the scene? If you’re not sure, imagine you remove it completely. Would it change the reading experience and your reader’s understanding of your story and characters? If yes, leave it. If not, you have two options: remove the scene or change it.

When you remove a scene, you don’t necessarily have to erase the events from your story. For example, you could summarise what has happened in the next scene, like “Darcy and Stacey came back from the supermarket, and for once they hadn’t argued about anything.” That would save your readers from having to read an extremely uneventful scene but they’d still know something had happened between two other scenes.

Let’s imagine your character Darcy ends up killing Stacey by hiding peanuts in her food and causing a fatal allergic reaction. If you really want to keep your supermarket scene, you could have Darcy noticing that they have extra large jars of satay sauce in the store or Stacey wanting to stay as far away as possible from Reese’s peanut butter cups. These are the guns you’ll be firing later on. Keep the scene fairly short, though, if you can’t work any other meaning or hints in the scene.

I know I already mentioned them before, but in case you just jumped to this section to check out your specific problem, here’s the Notion scene planner and the Notion novel planner again, and the Google Docs scene planner that make planning your scenes and therefore your whole novel easier.

Inconsistent point of view

In fiction, you have three options for point of view: first-person POV (I saw a cat), third person intimate POV (she saw a cat and she didn’t know if the cat had seen her) and omniscient POV (she saw a cat, but the cat had seen her first, as had all the other cats on the street). Short stories are sometimes written in second-person (you see a cat) but generally not full novels unless it’s something really experimental.

All the points of view have their own rules, but the most important rule is this: whichever point of view you choose, you must stick to it. If you’re writing from Kevin’s point of view, you can’t occasionally jump into Nick’s POV, and you can’t write in the third-person inimate POV and dip into omniscient when it suits you. I’ve read a couple of books where one character’s point of view was written from third person and another character’s from first person, but you do have to be intentional with that and you can’t confuse your readers.

The mistakes the beginner writers most often make with point of view are headhopping and including the wrong kind of information.

Headhopping means that you suddenly jump into another character’s point of view in the middle of a scene, and this usually happens when you’re writing in third-person intimate POV (it’s less likely to happen in first-person POV). If you’re writing from the POV of multiple characters, you can’t switch in the middle of a scene unless you’re using the omniscient POV. If you’re writing only from one POV, you can never wander into someone else’s thoughts and feelings. You have to figure out a different way of letting your readers know what that character is thinking of if it really is that important.

Including the wrong kind of information means that you’ve mentioned something that the POV character shouldn’t be privy to or what they wouldn’t normally think about themselves. How often do you think something like “I am pretty and I have blue eyes”, and would you know what your brother is currently thinking? Remember, when you’re writing in first-person or third-person intimate POV, you’re essentially being that character and you’re inside their head, so the character needs to think like a real person would think.

How to fix inconsistent POV in your writing

First of all, remember it’s totally fine to make these mistakes in your first draft. That’s what editing is for, it turns your writing into what it’s supposed to be. Fixing problems with your point of view can be time-consuming but it’s 100% worth the effort.

When you’re writing or editing a scene, make a note of whose POV you’re supposed to be writing from. If you find yourself wandering off, make corrections. Either you have to remove something completely or you have to figure out a different way to give the information to your readers. As you remove or change things, keep a list on the side so you’ll remember to deal with them and include them in different scenes – you’ll thank yourself later.

If you’re writing in third-person intimate POV, it’s basically the same as writing from first-person except for the pronouns, so you can test your writing by imagining you’ve written it from first-person – does it still make sense?

I actually rewrote one of my novels in first-person and I found an embarrassing amount of accidental omniscient point of view from my writing even though I had supposedly initially written in third-person intimate. You can read all about it here.

Writing characters who are too ordinary OR too perfect

Your characters need to have something that is exceptional about them as well as flaws that complicate the conflict of your story. Even if you’re writing about Eli Everyman, he needs to be funnier, braver, meaner, more outrageous, more SOMETHING than we are. This is particularly true when it comes to your protagonist – your other characters can afford to be a little less exceptional.

I’m currently reading Anatomy of Story by John Truby, and he says that a character needs a psychological flaw that makes the character harm herself in some way and a moral flaw that harms others, and overcoming those flaws is what helps her solve the big problem in the story. If your character doesn’t have significant enough flaws, there’s something lacking in your story.

At the same time, there needs to be something great about your character. Of course, authors write about “bad” people all the time, but even those characters need to have something that makes the reader go wow. Maybe they’re really funny, maybe they have a soft spot for their grandma or maybe they’re just really good at justifying their actions.

Just remember, your character’s only exceptional feature can’t be how they’re more beautiful or handsome than others, because that’s not that interesting and it probably doesn’t make them very likeable or relatable. What you also need to remember is that your readers can’t see your characters, and saying how beautiful someone is doesn’t really sound that convincing.

Always spend some extra time on their flaws when you’re creating characters, because it’s more difficult to come up with them afterwards, and besides, those flaws contribute to your character’s “dark night of the soul”. Their strengths are equally important to developing the story as well because they’re usually (unbeknownst to them) the very things that will help them solve the main conflict in a surprising way.

How to fix your characters

This is one of those things that’s easier to fix by starting over than by making changes to your existing writing. You need to have a clear idea of what your main character is like before you start writing your story and you can’t rush the character creation process.

But if you do want to fix your writing instead of starting over, you should take a closer look at scenes where your protagonist is interacting with other people. Can you somehow amp up the way they are? If they’re being witty, can you make them more witty? Can you make their mistakes bigger? Can they show their love more obviously? Look for chances where your character can be more than they already are without turning them into a caricature. Don’t be too shy here.

Nothing changes in your story

There needs to be CHANGE happening in your story and you need to show your readers how it happens and why it matters. If nothing changes, is it really a story?

I’ve talked about this before in my post about my writing process, but change is also the main ingredient of any scene in your story. Something needs to happen that changes things or changes the way your character goes about solving their problem, or there needs to be new information that will change things in the future or change your reader’s perception of your story world. Doesn’t matter how small it is, it needs to be there.

So if your main character and their world are completely unchanged at the end of the story, you really need to consider if what you’ve written is actually a story at all. That might sound harsh, but it’s true. It’s totally fine to write fun stuff with no point when you’re writing for yourself, and those stories are certainly good practice, but if you want to write an effective story for others to read, change is one of the elements that simply needs to be there in addition to conflict.

Why did I mention conflict again? Because a story is a change-making machine that turns your characters into changed people by throwing problems at them. That’s at the heart of my Troublemaker Method, and it makes plotting easier than ever.

How to fix lack of change in your story

I have a feeling you’re not going to like this answer, but… If nothing changes in your story, you’re going to have to write a different story.

Plan and outline a new story using story structure as your guide. That way you’ll be sure that what you’re writing is not just a series of unrelated events that lead nowhere. You can start crafting your stories more intuitively once you’ve gained more experience.

Think of your protagonist’s flaws and problems. What needs to change there? Then, how can you tie that change to a bigger picture? How can solving an external problem solve the protagonist’s inner problems, too? How can they change on the inside while changing the external world? These are extremely important questions that your story needs to answer.

Dumping backstory in the beginning is a common beginner writer mistake

If you’re reading this, you’re not one of Jane Austen’s contemporaries and you probably shouldn’t start your story by describing your main character’s family tree and estate in detail. Often it’s enough that YOU know the backstory, but your readers needn’t hear ALL of it.

You might think it’s important that your readers know about your character’s traumatic past, and you might be right, but you’re robbing yourself of writing a really impactful story if you dump it all out in the beginning. You can show the shadow of what has happened without stating it outright, and you should hold off information until the moment it’s most effective.

Another thing I learned from Anatomy of Story is that your story should be built on a series of revelations. That is, you should keep introducing new information to the reader and to your protagonist. Some of this information can include things from the character’s past and it wouldn’t wow your readers as much if you spelled it all out in the beginning.

How to fix infodumping

The first step to fixing infodumping is recognising it. Starting from the beginning, find any passages of writing where you’re sharing a lot of information about something that isn’t currently happening. Now take it all out – will it matter to your story if it’s all gone? If not, don’t put it back, but if yes, put the most important piece of information back. Do you absolutely need the rest? Sprinkle them somewhere else.

Witholding information from your readers until the right moment is a great way to create suspense and to make moments more meaningful. Experiment on revealing information at different times and see what that does to your story.

Do you want to jump into writing your novel the right way?

I know, writing a novel is not easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it. But when you start it off strong, it’s a lot easier to finish what you started and feel confident that you’ve got what it takes to write a good novel.

I know so many aspiring authors struggle with starting, so I created this free 5-day course that gets you started in less than a week. Imagine if a week from now you were already writing your first draft!

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Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.