The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes

by Jack M. Bickham

  The moral: Although most of us do everything we can to avoid trouble in real life, we must do just the opposite as writers of fiction. We must seek out ways to add trouble to our characters' lives, putting just as much pressure on them as we can. For it's from plot trouble that reader interest comes.

  There are many kinds of fiction trouble, but the most effective kind is conflict.

  You know what conflict is. It's active give-and-take, a struggle between story people with opposing goals.

  It is not, please note, bad luck or adversity. It isn't fate. It's a fight of some kind between people with opposing goals.

  Fate, bad luck or whatever you choose to call it may play a part in your fiction too. Adversity—that snowstorm that keeps your character from having an easy drive to the mountain cabin, for example, or the suspicious nature of the townspeople that complicates your detective's investigation—is nice, too. But these problems are blind; they are forces of some kind that operate willy-nilly, without much reason—and so are things that your character can't confront and grapple with.

  In other words, it's all well and good to have your character leave his house in the morning and slip and fall on a banana peel, thus making him feel bad all day. But such an event comes out of nowhere for no good reason; like real-life events, it makes no sense. It is caused by nothing much and leads to nothing special.

  Adversity in all its forms may create some sympathy for your character. But your character can't reasonably try to understand it, plot against it, or even confront it in a dramatic way.

  Conflict, on the other hand, is a fight with another person. It's dramatic, onstage now, with the kind of seesaw give-and-take that makes most sporting events—many courtroom trials—exciting stuff. When in conflict, your character knows who the opponent is and has a chance to struggle against him. In conflict, your character has a chance to change the course of events. In taking the challenge and entering the fray, your character proves himself to be worthy as a story hero: he's trying to take charge of his life... determine the outcome... win.

  Thus, if you're a wise writer of fiction, you spend a good deal of your plotting hours devising ways to set up more fights. In real life you might walk around the block to avoid meeting Maryanne, the neighbor who always wants to start an argument with you. In your fiction, you may walk your hero a mile just to get him into position so he can have a fight with the person who most irritates him.

  The calmer and more peaceful your real life, the better, in all likelihood. Your story person's life is just the opposite. You the author must never duck trouble—conflict—in the story. You seek it out, because that's where the excitement and involvement—as well as reader sympathy for your character—lie.

  Please note that conflict does not necessarily mean an actual physical fight, although sometimes it certainly may be exactly that. Conflict may be any of the following examples:

  • Two men argue in a board meeting, each intent on convincing the members of the board that he should be named president of the firm.

  • A young woman pleads with her father to accept into the family the man she loves.

  • Two can race along a highway, the driver of one intent on forcing the other off the road.

  • A detective persistently questions an uncooperative witness, trying to dig out information that would help solve a murder.

  • A man maneuvers in a dark alley, trying to slip away from an armed pursuer whose occasional small sounds give away his position.

  • Lovers'quarrel.

  • A man and woman discuss whether to buy a new car. He wants if she doesn't.

  • A woman reporter tries to get information for a story from a derelict on skid row, but he keeps slipping away from the subject, into reminiscences.

  • Daniel Boone fights a bear.

  Of course you will think of many more examples, once you have it clear in your mind that conflict always means a fight, at some level.

  How do you make sure you have a fight and not some form of blind bad luck?

  You make sure two characters are involved.

  You give them opposing goals.

  You put them onstage now.

  You make sure both are motivated to struggle now.

  Virtually all the high points of most stories involve conflict. It's the fuel that makes fiction go. Nothing is more exciting and involving. And—please note—"fiction friction" of this kind is another example of how fiction is better than life.

  In life, you might walk out of your house in the morning and get struck by lightning.

  Blind luck, meaningless, against which you are powerless. Life is like that. Dumb! But in fiction the character has the power: he can control his own destiny, or at least thinks he can.

  He will struggle, if he's worth writing about, and will encounter endless fights. The outcome will depend on him—not on blind luck.

  A lot better than life sometimes is, right?

  Of course.

  10. DON'T HAVE THINGS HAPPEN FOR NO REASON

  ONE MORNING NOT LONG ago, my student Wally came by the office with part of another story. Sipping my second cup of coffee, I read what he had brought to me.

  "Wally," I said finally, this story doesn't make sense."

  "What do you mean?" Wally asked.

  "I mean your characters don't seem to have any background motivation for their story intentions here, they constantly seem to be running into other people and information strictly by coincidence, and they often do or say things for no apparent immediate reason."

  Wally looked blank. "That's bad?"

  "Wally, it makes your story totally illogical!"

  "Wait a minute," Wally protested. "I don't have to be logical. I'm writing fiction!"

  It's a fairly common misconception, this one of Wally's. Since fiction is make-believe, says this line of reasoning, then the most important thing is to be imaginative and original—and so anyone who tries to argue for logic and credibility in a story must be trying to thwart somebody's artistic genius.

  The truth, as you've probably already begun to see, is just the opposite. Because fiction is make-believe, it has to be more logical than real life if it is to be believed. In real life, things may occur for no apparent reason. But in fiction you the writer simply cannot ever afford to lose sight of logic and let things happen for no apparent reason.

  To make your stories logical, and therefore believable, you work always to make sure there is always a reason for what happens.

  For one thing, you always provide characters with the right background—upbringing, experience, information—to motivate them generally in the direction of the action you want to show them taking.

  A character, if she is to act with seeming reason, must come from a personal background that qualifies her to accomplish your plot action. You must set things up so that her general background—family, upbringing, education, health, whatever—make it seem reasonable that she would act as you want her to act in the story.

  As an extreme example here, let's say you want your character to preach a sermon some Sunday in a Southern Baptist church, citing the life of Christ as the perfect type for all to emulate. Only a slow thinker would fail to put something in the story earlier to show how the character was either brought up in a Christian home, or went through a religious conversion to Christianity. Thus the general background must be given, or else the character's actions may seem to come from no logical origin.

  Following the same example a step further, remember that the general background may not be enough. Your readers will also want to know the more recent event or events that have given your character the motivation to do what she is doing right now. Thus, in the example cited, you might have the Christian woman's minister husband fall suddenly ill, which prompts her, in desperation, to fill in for him after the congregation has already assembled. Or you might set things up so the sermon is to be some kind of test set up by the church's governing board. Whatever you pick, you will pick someth
ing that will explain how and why she got up there in the pulpit now, doing what you the writer want her to do in the way you want her to do it.

  (Do you want her to be nervous or calm? Sad or happy? You'll need to provide recent cause for these desired aspects of her performance, too.)

  A great many stories tend to be unbelievable because the writer just shoved a character onstage to do something without thinking through how and why the character got there. You must constantly examine your story logic to make sure you have not inadvertently committed the same error.

  But problems with logic in your fiction don't end with background motivation. Another kind of error that can destroy the evident logic of a story is the use of excessive luck or coincidence.

  In real life, coincidence happens all the time. But in fiction—especially when the coincidence helps the character be at the right place at the right time, or overhear the crucial telephone conversation, or something similar—coincidence is deadly. Your readers will refuse to believe it. And you can't afford to let your readers stop believing.

  When the long arm of coincidence helps your character along, it's just good luck. Reading about someone blundering along, getting lucky, is neither very interesting nor very inspiring. A story filled with coincidence tends to make no sense because there is no real reason why things happen—they just happen.

  In real life that's good enough. In fiction it isn't.

  Now you may see another reason why we advised you not to write about wimps in Chapter Eight. To get a wimp to accomplish anything, you almost have to fall back on incredible coincidence, which erodes reader belief and makes your story an accidental mess.

  Your character can't sit home passively and accidentally get a telephone call from friend Max, who then volunteers a crucial clue in the murder mystery. Your character has to think things over and then decide that he will call people seeking information. After calling several other people, he comes to Max on his list. He calls Max. Max doesn't want to tell him, but you make your character persist. Finally your character convinces Max to talk, and Max gives him the next clue.

  This way, instead of being fat, dumb and happy—and having a stroke of good luck for no reason—your character instead has worked for what he has gotten. And that is satisfying.

  First-draft fiction tends to be full of unrealized coincidences. Your character goes to a strange town and "just happens" to meet an old friend on the street. Or she gets to buy a long-coveted new dress because she "just happens" to walk by the store on the one afternoon when it's for sale, and it "just happens" to fit her perfectly, and she "just happens" to get there five minutes before Annabelle, who also wanted the dress.

  Readers may not realize why they don't believe your story when you allow this kind of sloppy plot planning to ease the way for you, but they won't like it.

  After your first draft, watch with an eagle eye for coincidences, either ones you might have impatiently allowed in the first write-through just to get on with it, or (even worse) those you simply didn't recognize earlier as outlandishly lucky.

  How do you fix coincidence? First, you excise it. Second, you search for a way by which your character can set out seeking the desired event, person or information. If your character wants something, and works hard to get it, it isn't coincidence anymore.

  Having provided your characters with sufficient background and motivation for their actions, and then by making sure coincidence doesn't rule the day, you'll be well along on the way to better story logic. Things will happen for good reason, and your readers will love you for it.

  11. DON'T FORGET STIMULUS AND RESPONSE

  STORY LOGIC GOES DEEPER than providing good background motivation and avoiding coincidence. Even if you're an ace on these matters, your copy still may be flawed in terms of having things happen for no apparent reason. That's because fiction readers may need more than background and good motive for what their characters do in a story.

  Readers will also usually need to see a specific stimulus that causes a given response right here and now.

  The law of stimulus and response dictates that your character must have an immediate, physical cause for what he does. This immediate stimulus cannot be merely a thought inside his head; for readers to believe many transactions, they have to be shown a stimulus to action that is outside of the character—some kind of specific prod that is onstage right now.

  So for every response you desire in a character, you must provide an immediate stimulus. Turning this around, it's equally true that if you start by showing a stimulus, then you can't simply ignore it; you must show a response.

  The law of stimulus and response works at the nitty-gritty level of fiction, line to line, and it also works in melding larger parts of the story. For every cause, an effect. For every effect, a cause. A domino does not fall for no immediate reason; it has to be nudged by the domino next to it.

  Let's consider a bit further.

  The chapter just before this one looked at character background and plot motivation before mentioning stimulus and response because it's important for you clearly to understand the difference. Background, as we have seen, goes to earlier actions affecting the character's life. Motivation has to do with the character's desires and plans, which grow out of that background, as well as out of what's been going on earlier in the story. Stimulus is much more immediate: it's what happens right now, outside the character, to make him do what he's going to do in the next few moments.

  For example, if in your story you want your character Martha to walk into the personnel director's office to seek a job, you need some background to explain why she needs a job; perhaps she comes from a poor family and has no means of support (long-term background) and maybe she just lost some other job, and so needs a new one right away (short-term background). She has made the decision to apply at this company because she just spent her last few dollars to pay her rent (even shorter-term background, combined with motivation).

  Even so, you can't just have Martha sitting there in the office, suddenly get up, and walk into the personnel director's office. In fiction, that won't work; it will seem unreal, incredible. What you have to have is an immediate stimulus to get Martha to get up and walk in now.

  So you write something like:

  The secretary looked up at Martha and said, "You can go in now." (Stimulus.)

  Martha got up and walked into the office. (Response.)

  This is how stimulus-response writing works. It's a bit like a game of baseball. The pitcher throws the ball; the batter swings at the ball. You wouldn't have the pitcher throwing the ball and nobody at the plate swinging at it, would you? And you couldn't have the batter swinging at the ball without a pitcher being out there to throw it, could you?

  Strangely enough, novice fiction writers often mess up their copy by doing something almost as obviously wrong as the pitcher-batter mistakes just cited. What happens is that the writer either doesn't know about stimulus-response movement in fiction, or else she forgets it.

  The latter error is more common. Almost anyone can see the innate logic of stimulus-response transactions once it is pointed out to them. But in writing, it's amazing how easy it is for some of these same fictioneers to let their imagination get ahead of their logic and see the whole transaction in their mind, but then forget to provide the reader all the steps.

  My student Wally provided me with a classic example of such forgetfulness once. He wrote:

  Max walked into the room. He ducked just in time.

  I looked up from Wally's page and asked, "Why did Max duck? What did he duck? What's going on here?"

  Wally scratched his head. "Well, Sally was mad at him. You knew that "

  "Wally," I protested, "the fact she was angry is background. If I'm to understand why Max ducks, I've got to see an immediate stimulus. Why did he duck?"

  "She threw a hand mirror at him," Wally said.

  "Then you've got to put that in your copy!"

  "You mean," Wally
said, "I've got to put in every step?"

  Of course.

  Stimulus and response seems so simple, but it's so easy to forget or overlook. I urge you to examine some of your own fiction copy very minutely. Every moment two characters are in interaction, look for the stimulus, then look for the immediate response. Then look for how the other character responds in turn. The stimuli and responses fly back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball, and no step can be left out.

  And please let me add a few more words to emphasize a point that might otherwise be skimmed over or misunderstood. Stimulus-response transactions—the heart of logic in fiction copy—are external. They are played outside the characters, onstage now.

  Background is not stimulus.

  Motivation is not stimulus.

  Character thought or feeling is not stimulus.

  The stimulus must come from outside, so if put on a stage the audience could see or hear it.

  The response that completes the transaction must be outside, too, if the interaction is to continue. Only if the interaction of the characters is to end immediately can the response be wholly internal.

  I mention all this because so many of my writing students over the years have tried so hard to evade the precept of stimulus and response. Whenever I explain the procedure in a classroom, it's virtually inevitable that someone will pipe up with, "Can I have the character do something in response to a thought or feeling, without anything happening outside?"

  My reply is no, you can't.

  Consider: If you start having your character get random thoughts or feelings, and acting on them all the time, the logic of the character and your story will break down. In real life, you might get a random thought for no apparent reason, and as a consequence do or say something. But as we discussed in Chapter Ten, among other places, fiction has to be better than life, clearer and more logical. It is always possible to dream up something—some stimulus—that can happen to cause the thought or feeling internally, and it is always possible to dream up something the responding character can then do in the physical sense as the visible, onstage response to the stimulus. Response always follows stimulus onstage now. Response is always caused by a stimulus, onstage now. The fact that there may be some thought or emotional process inside the character between the two events does not mean they both don't always have to be there.