The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes

by Jack M. Bickham

  If your stories seem to be moving too slowly, you might analyze some of your copy, looking at what form of writing you tend to use. It could be that you are describing too many sunsets (in one form or another) and never using any dialogue or dramatic summary. On the other hand, if you sense that your stories whiz along at too breakneck a speed, perhaps you need to change some of that dramatic summary into narrative, or even pause (briefly!) now and then to describe what the setting looks like, or what the character is thinking or feeling.

  In this way, you can become more conscious of your tendencies as a fiction writer, and begin to see which tendencies help you, and which tend to hold you back from selling. You can learn better to call your shots in terms of pacing your yarn, selecting the delivery system that's needed for the desired effect, and keeping the yam moving.

  7. DON'T USE REAL PEOPLE IN YOUR STORY

  ONE OF MY NEW WRITING students, a gent we shall call Wally, came by my office the other day with the first pages of a new story. I read the pages and then handed them back to him.

  "Wally," I complained as gently as I could, "these characters are really not very interesting."

  Wally frowned, not understanding.

  I tried again: "Wally, these characters are dull. What they are is flat and insipid. They are pasteboard. They have no life, no color, no vivacity. They need a lot of work."

  Wally looked shocked. "How can these characters be dull? They're real people—every one of them! I took them right out of real life!"

  "Oh," I said. "So that's the problem."

  "What?" he said.

  "You can never use real people in your story."

  "Why?"

  "For one reason, real people might sue you. But far more to the point in fiction copy, real people—taken straight over and put on the page of a story—are dull."

  Wally sat up straighter. "Are you telling me my friends are dull?"

  "Of course not!" I told him. "That's not the point. The point is that in fiction real people aren't vivid enough. Good characters have to be constructed, not copied from actuality." Wally was discouraged. But I tried to explain it to him with something like this:

  One of the toughest jobs we ask of our readers is to see characters vividly and sympathize with them. Consider: all your readers have to go by are some symbols printed on a sheet of paper. From these symbols, readers must recognize letters of the alphabet, make the letters into words, derive meaning from the words, link the meanings into sentences. From that point, readers must make an even more amazing leap of faith or intuition of some kind: they must use their own imagination to picture—physically and emotionally—a person inside their own head. And then they must believe this imagined person is somehow real—and even care about him.

  Readers need all the help they can get to perform this arduous imaginative-emotional task. They have a lot to see through to get the job done even imperfectly.

  To help them, you can't simply transcribe what you see and know about a real person. You have to construct something that is far bigger than life, far more exaggerated. Then, if you do your job of exaggeration extremely well, your readers will see your gross exaggeration dimly, but well enough to think, "This constructed character looks like a real person to me."

  Good fiction characters, in other words, are never, ever real people. Your idea for a character may begin with a real person, but to make him vivid enough for your readers to believe in him, you have to exaggerate tremendously; you have to provide shortcut identifying characteristics that stick out all over him, you have to make him practically a monster—for readers to see even his dimmest outlines.

  Thus, even if you start with some real person, you won't end up with him as your character.

  For example, if your real person is loyal, you will make your character tremendously, almost unbelievably loyal; if he tends to be a bit impatient in real life, your character will fidget, gnash his teeth, drum his fingers, interrupt others, twitch, and practically blow sky high with his outlandishly exaggerated impatience. In addition, you may find that it helps your creation if you take one or two other real-life people and add their most exaggerated impatient characteristics.

  What you will end up with, if you do well, will be a dimly perceived construct who no longer bears any resemblance to the real person with whom you started. Because good characters are in no way like real people ... not really.

  In addition, to create a fictional character, you will give him some highly recognizable tags that are—again—more exaggerated than anything we'll ever encounter in real life. Thus our impatient character will also be nervous. Hell smoke, a lot. He'll always be lighting a cigarette, asking for a match, putting out a cigarette, puffing smoke. His habit of drumming his fingers on the table will be shown often, as another tag of impatience and nervousness. He'll interrupt people and be rude—push past others to get into the elevator, give snappish answers to questions, honk his horn at the driver in front of him the instant the light turns green, and so on. And all these tags that you devise will be waved often, not just occasionally, as they might appear in real life.

  Good fiction characters also tend to be more understandable than real-life people. They do the things they do for motives that make more sense than real-life motives often do. While they're more mercurial and colorful, they're also more goal-motivated. Readers must be able to understand why your character does what he does; they may not agree with his motives, but you have carefully set things up so at least they can see that he's acting as he is for some good reason.

  In all these ways fiction characters are not just different than life. They're better. Bigger. Brighter. More understandable. Nicer or meaner. Prettier or uglier. And ultimately more fascinating.

  I can almost hear your silent protest: "But I want to write realistic fiction." Good. So do I. Yet, to convey an illusion of realism, you as a good fiction writer can never transcribe real people; you must build your characters, taking aspects of real people and exaggerating some angles while suppressing others, adding a bit of Charlie's choleric nature to Archibald's pathos, tossing in some of Andrew's brittle way of talking, salting with your own list of tags that you made up from your imagination, sticking on the motives, plans, hopes and fears that you made up as the author for this character because they're what you as the author need to have in this particular stow.

  Even the names of your characters are constructed. "Brick Bradley" by his very name is a different character from "Percy Flower" "Mother Theresa" can never be the same kind of person as a "Dolores LaRue" Even your character names are constructs, not reality.

  And consider character background In real life, a young woman may come out of a poverty-stricken rural background and still somehow become the president of a great university. Except in a long novel, where you might have sufficient space to make it believable, you would have a hard time selling this meshing of background and present reality in fiction. Chances are that in a short story you would make up a far different background for your female university president, perhaps constructing an early life as the favorite or only daughter of a college professor mother and physician father. (In short fiction, characters and their backgrounds are almost always much more consistent than people in real life.)

  Motivation? Again, fictional characters are better than life. In real life, people often seem to do things for no reason we can understand. They act on impulses that grow out of things in their personalities that even they sometimes don't understand. But in fiction there is considerably less random chance. While good characters are capable of surprising readers—and should sometimes do so for verisimilitude—such characters are always understandable on fairly simple later analysis.

  To put this point another way, in real life people often don't make sense. But in fiction, they do.

  The author sees to that.

  Just as she sees to many other things about her characters, remembering always that fiction people are not real people.

  It's j
ust one of several ways that fiction surpasses and improves upon life. And that's a good thing, isn't it? After all, if fiction were really just like life, why would we have to have it at all? What need would it meet? Who would care about it?

  We spin tales... make up story people. None of it is real, and therein lies its beauty. In your stories, as in all the stories ever told, you must hold the magnifying glass up to your people and events for readers to appreciate them at all... and thus briefly enter a private world, largely of their own imagining—made vivid by your crafty help.

  8. DON'T WRITE ABOUT WIMPS

  FICTION WRITERS TOO OFTEN FORGET that interesting characters are almost always characters who are active—risk-takers—highly motivated toward a goal. Many a story has been wrecked at the outset because the writer chose to write about the wrong kind of person—a character of the type we sometimes call a wimp.

  You know what a wimp is.

  He's the one who wouldn't fight under any circumstances.

  Ask him what he wants, and he just sighs.

  Poke him, and he flinches—and retreats.

  Confront him with a big problem, and he fumes and fusses and can't make a decision.

  Now, in real life there are a lot of wimps. You and I have both been wimpy far more often than we would like to admit. We get confused, we get scared, we get far too ambivalent, and we just sit around and wait to see what might happen next.

  To put it another way, in reality—in the real world—much of what happens is accidental. "Isn't life funny!" we exclaim, after fate has taken a hand and something has worked out by itself, seemingly. And so we stagger on, major life changes just sort of happening, and we often don't take the bull by the horns because we can't even figure out where the damned bull is.

  That's reality.

  But fiction isn't reality, as we said before, it's better.

  So, in most effective fiction, accidents don't determine the outcome. And your story people don't sit around passively. (Now and then you'll find a story in which what I've just said is disproven; but I'm talking about most successful fiction. Most readers don't want their stories to tell them life is random. They want to hear just the opposite. They want to believe something. What they want to believe is that trying hard can pay off, and that people are in charge of their own fate.)

  That's why wimps—spineless drifters who won't or can't rouse themselves to try—usually make terrible fiction characters.

  Good fiction characters are fighters. They know what they want, they encounter trouble, and they struggle. They don't give up and they don't retire from the action. They don't wait for fate to settle the issue. In good fiction, the story people determine the outcome. Not fate. This is just another of the many ways in which fiction surpasses life and is better than real life.

  Look at it this way: A good story is the record of movement. A good story is movement. Someone pushes; someone else pushes back. At some level, therefore, a story is the record of a fight.

  If you accept this premise, then it's obvious that you can't invest the action and outcome of your story in a wimp. He'll refuse to struggle, won't push back when shoved, and will run and hide at the first opportunity.

  "I just can't make anything happen in my story," you'll hear another writer complain. Or, "I've got a good idea, but can't seem to keep it moving." Or, "Something is wrong with my new story; it seems dull, and the characters are lifeless." In all such cases, the real problem is not with plot, but with the kind of central character the writer has chosen to write about. Jerk that wimp out of the story and put in someone who will press ahead like the movie characters that John Wayne used to play, or the ones usually portrayed today by someone like Clint Eastwood. Now something will start happening!

  Does this mean that every character has to be as violent and headlong as a Clint Eastwood movie character? By no means. Just because a character is strongly goal-motivated and active doesn't mean he has to be a superhero. A character may be active—refuse to give up or stop trying—yet still be scared or sometimes unsure of himself In actuality, such a character, who acts despite worry or fear, is stronger than the one who simply plunges onward without doubt or thought.

  How do you build a strong character who will act and not be a wimp? In the first place, you determine to do so. You throw away any wrong ideas you may have about the quiet, contemplative, sensitive, thoughtful character, and recognize that it isn't very interesting, watching somebody sit in his easy chair and ponder things. Your character has to be a person capable of action, and that's for starters.

  Now, having decided that you'll write about someone who is willing to do something rather than sit around and await the workings of fate, you have to nudge him into action. How do you do that? By hitting him with that threatening change we talked about earlier.

  At this point, you put yourself in your character's shoes and begin to give him a game plan. This is his response to whatever threatening change now faces him. He does not give up or whine; he decides to do something to fix his plight. He sets out with a goal. He is committed. Attainment of his goal is essential to his happiness.

  All well and good. Having come this far, you have started to build your story as a quest. Virtually all contemporary fiction, at some level, is the record of such a quest. The "Indiana Jones" thrillers worked on the big screen because they were pure quest (in the third such adventure, it was literally a quest for the Holy Grail). Your story may involve a lesser goal, literally speaking, but it can be no less vital to your character.

  • Something has changed.

  • Your character is threatened.

  • He vows to struggle.

  • He selects a goal and starts taking action toward it.

  And you have a story under way.

  It sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Then why do so many writers make it so hard?

  Why, for example, do they let themselves get so tangled up in background information that the character has to sit around for page after page, while the author does a core dump of old information? Why do they let the character worry and fume for page after page instead of doing something. Why do they plunge into Freudian analysis of the poor guy instead of letting him get off the couch and get after it?

  Confusion of confusions, all is confusion when you forget, even briefly, and allow your character to act like a wimp. Male or female, young or old, lovelorn or treasure-bound, your central story person has to act. And he has to confront at least one other story person who is also decidedly un-wimpy, so there can be a struggle. The minute somebody quits or retires from the action even temporarily, your story dies on the vine.

  We're talking here mainly about major characters in your story. But even minor characters may suffer from passivity. You should examine all your characters to see if making them stronger-acting might make them also more vivid and interesting. For the wimpy character usually tends to fade into the woodwork and be dull.

  Now, this may sound like I'm arguing for only one kind of story, an action/adventure. Nothing could be further from the truth. While a strong, goal-motivated character is easier seen in such a yarn, the effective character in even the quietest modern story will almost always be a person capable of action. In a romance novel, for example, the young woman may seem unwilling to face the man to whom she is attracted and may even deny her own feelings and actively avoid him. But please note that she is taking action, even if it is sometimes negative. In a psychological story about a man assailed by self-doubt and uncertainty, he will realize that he has a problem and see a doctor or take a pill or discuss it with a friend or write a letter or do something.

  So that—to repeat for emphasis—every story is the record of a quest. An active character worth writing about will form some goal, based on his plight and his motives. He will work toward that goal, not sit back passively. And—wonder to behold—his active selection of a goal will be picked up by the reader and used as a basis for suspense.

  Any time a character form
s a goal-oriented intention in fiction, the reader will turn the goal statement around and make it into a story question—and then begin worrying about it! This is an activity at which the reader is wonderfully adept. You give your un-wimpy character the goal of finding his lost sister, and the reader instantly worries, Will he find his lost sister? Or you give your character the specific goal of winning a better job, and your reader immediately worries, Will she get the better job?

  From this process of reader-translation—character goal to story question—comes reader worry, or to give it another name, suspense.

  Let me suggest that you look hard and long at the kind of characters you typically tend to write about. Are any of them wimps? Do they whine or sit around passively or "wait and see"? If so, they may be at the heart of your problems as a writer of fiction.

  How do you get them going? First you change your assumptions about what makes a good fiction character. Then you present them with a pressing problem. Then you decide what they are going to do about it—now. And finally you keep them moving, continuing to struggle; you never allow them to give up or retire from the story action. They move and they press and they keep on, always questing after their goal, whether it's a date to the high school prom or the Holy Grail.

  Same thing, ultimately. Because whatever it is, it's essential to your character's happiness, and that character will not give up. He's determined; he's going to try and try again. He's going to fight to maintain control of his life—and determine his own destiny.

  I like him, don't you?

  I care about him already, don't you?

  9. DON'T DUCK TROUBLE

  IN FICTION, THE BEST times for the writer—and reader—are when the story's main character is in the worst trouble. Let your character relax, feel happy and content, and be worried about nothing, and your story dies. Pour on all sorts of woes so your poor character is thoroughly miserable and in the deepest kind of trouble, and your story perks right up—along with your reader's interest.