The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes

by Jack M. Bickham

  If you find yourself skipping stimuli or responses, or substituting shooting-star internal impulses for stimuli—or failing to show external responses after stimuli—it is certain that your fiction isn't making good sense to the reader. He will complain that, in your stories, things are happening for no reason. And he'll hate your stuff. He may not know why, but he won't believe it.

  So, no matter how good you think you are in these logical terms, wouldn't it be a good idea to take just a few minutes someday soon and comb over your copy to make doubly sure?

  12. DON'T FORGET WHOSE STORY IT IS

  VIEWPOINT.

  That's what this section—and the one to follow—are all about.

  Viewpoint is perhaps the most-discussed aspect of fiction, yet the one most often screwed up. But perhaps you will never have serious technical problems with the technique of viewpoint again if you will simply follow the advice that heads this page.

  Figure out whose story it is.

  Get inside that character—and stay there.

  That's all there is to it. Except that in its simplicity, viewpoint has many angles to its application.

  I'm sure you realize why fiction is told from a viewpoint, a character inside the story. It's because each of us lives our real life from a single viewpoint—our own—and none other, ever. The fiction writer wants her story to be as convincing and lifelike as possible. So she sets things up so that readers will experience the story just like they experience real life: from one viewpoint inside the action.

  Each of us is the hero of his own life. The next time you are in a group of people, take a moment to realize how you see everything and everyone around you as interesting—but essentially as role players in your life. Then try to observe others around you... try to imagine how each of them sees the scene in exactly the same way, from their own unique and centrally important viewpoint.

  If fiction is to work, your central character has to experience the story action this way too. How do you as the writer make it happen? Very simply by showing all the action from inside the head and heart—the thought, senses and emotions—of the person you have chosen as the viewpoint character.

  It matters not whether you choose to write the story first person: "Worried, I walked down the lonely street.... " or third person: "Worried, she walked down the lonely street." The device is the same. You let your reader experience everything from inside that viewpoint character.

  In short fiction there will usually be a single viewpoint per story.

  Changing viewpoint in a short story, where unity of effect is so crucial, usually makes the story seem disjointed. In a novel, there may be several viewpoints, but one must clearly dominate. That's because every story is ultimately one person's story above all others, just as your life story is yours and yours alone. It's a fatal error to let your viewpoint jump around from character to character, with no viewpoint clearly dominating, in terms of how much of the story is experienced from that viewpoint. Life isn't like that. Fiction shouldn't be, either.

  To put this in other words: even in a novel of 100,000 words, well over 50 percent—probably closer to 70 percent—should be clearly and rigidly in the viewpoint of the main character. That character's thoughts, feelings, perceptions and intentions should unmistakably dominate the action. When you change viewpoint—if you must—it should be only when the change in viewpoint serves to illuminate for readers the problems of the main viewpoint character.

  Where do you put the viewpoint? The easy and obvious answer is that you give the viewpoint to the character who will be in all the right places to experience the crucial stuff in the plot (It's pretty clear, for example, that if you want to tell the story of a mountain-climbing expedition in Tibet, you can't very well put the viewpoint inside a child who never gets outside of Topeka, Kansas.)

  Beyond this point, however, other factors must be considered. Readers like to worry through their stories. They'll worry most about the viewpoint character. And what are readers likely to worry about most? Whether the character with the most important goal will reach that goal. Therefore it follows that you should give the viewpoint to the character who has the goal motivation that makes the story go... the character who will be in action toward some worthwhile end... the story person with the most to win or lose in the story action.

  This character—the one threatened at the outset who vows to struggle—will be the character who ultimately is most moved by what takes place. That's why some fiction theorists say the viewpoint should be invested in the character who will be most changed by the story action.

  It has been pointed out, however, that it's an inevitable result in fiction that the viewpoint character and the moved character will become one and the same. If you don't start out planning your story that way, it will either end up that way—or the story will be a flop. Because the viewpoint character is the focus of all the story's actions and meanings, the viewpoint character must become the moved character; it can be no other way.

  What does this mean for you as a writer working with viewpoint? For one thing, it means that you simply can't write a story in which the viewpoint is put inside a neutral observer. It won't work. Even in a novel like The Great Gatsby, the character Gatsby ultimately is not the most important character. Nick Carraway is the one who is finally moved... changed... made to see a different vision of the world, and so decides to go back to the Midwest at the end of the story. Nick is the narrator, the viewpoint character, and finally the story is his, and the meaning derived from his sensibilities, whatever the novel may be titled.

  To sum up, then, this is what I meant when I say you mustn't forget whose story it is:

  • Every story must be told from a viewpoint inside the action.

  • Every story must have a clearly dominant viewpoint character.

  • The viewpoint character must be the one with the most at stake.

  • Every viewpoint character will be actively involved in the plot.

  Probably since the dawn of time, beginning writers have wrestled with these principles, hoping to find a way around them. They seem harsh and restrictive. But after you have worked with them a while, you will find them to be very useful in focusing your story. A storyteller has plenty to worry about without wondering whose story it is, or from what vantage point the reader is supposed to experience the story! And, even more to the point from a practical standpoint, you might as well accept viewpoint as a central—perhaps the central—device of fiction. You can't escape it. It's simply at the center of how fiction works on readers.

  You mustn't forget.

  13. DON'T FAIL TO MAKE THE VIEWPOINT CLEAR

  LET'S SUPPOSE YOU'RE WRITING a story about Bob, and you have decided that he is the viewpoint character. How do you make sure that your handling of his viewpoint is as powerful as it can possibly be?

  The first thing you must do is imagine the story as it would seem to Bob, and only to Here you really get to exercise your imagination.

  As you write the story, you the writer must become Bob. You see what he sees, and nothing more. You know what he knows, and nothing more. You hear only what he hears, feel only the emotions he feels, plan only what he can plan, and so on. When you start a scene in which Bob walks into a large room, for example, you do not imagine how the room looks from some god-like authorial stance high above the room, or as a television camera might see it; you see it only as Bob sees it, coming in... perhaps first being aware only of the light from the far windows glaring in his face, then noticing how warm the air is, then becoming aware of the blurry sea of faces in the audience, then detecting an interior nudge of apprehension, then thinking, "I'll convince these people that my opinion is right. "

  If you'll stop to ponder it a moment, you'll see that this imaginative linking with your viewpoint character not only makes the story more like real life, but also makes your creative task somewhat easier. You don't have to know what Sally in the back room is seeing or thinking. All that kind of complication i
s out of Bob's awareness, and therefore out of the story. All you have to do is track along with Bob, and make his experience of the scene as vivid and meaningful as you can.

  Having once gotten yourself thoroughly into Bob's viewpoint, however, you need to go a bit further in terms of technique. You need to keep reminding your readers who the viewpoint character is.

  To that end, you constantly use grammatical constructions that emphasize Bob's seeing, hearing, thinking, etc.

  For example, you would not write something like, "The meeting room for the speech was stuffy." Instead, you would phrase the statement to emphasize that it's Bob's awareness: "Bob felt the stuffy heat of the room close around him and knew he had to make a good speech to hold this audience."

  By using clauses like "Bob felt" and words like "knew," the writer is showing unequivocally that we are in Bob's viewpoint. Only Bob can know how he feels. Only Bob can know for certain what he is seeing or noticing at that moment. This leads to reader identification with Bob, which is vital if the reader is to have a sense of focus.

  Notice, too, that by establishing a relationship between the environment (the hot, crowded room) and the viewpoint (Bob), the professional writer goes on to set up a cause-effect relationship between the outside world from Bob's viewpoint and his interior, feeling-thinking life. Bob goes in, makes some observations, and as a result realizes he has to make the speech of his life. Thus the setting isn't just a static thing being examined for no reason; it has importance; it affects how Bob is feeling; as a result, he is going to act somewhat differently.

  This movement, from outside the viewpoint character to inside that same character, is at the heart of moment-to-moment motivation in fiction. It is also a very powerful characterization device. You the writer can show the outside world from a viewpoint then, by relating that outside view to some internal reaction inside your character—which only your character can possibly know—you can share your first little secret with the reader as to what kind of a person this viewpoint character really is.

  Does that make sense? Look at it this way: What if Bob's internal response, above, had been to feel amused? Abused? Frightened? Justified? Arrogant? In each case, this single shown response would change his characterization.

  By picking a viewpoint and emphasizing it constantly, in other words, you do more than usefully limit your authorial problems, and you accomplish more even than making the story lifelike... and building sympathy for the viewpoint character. In addition to these benefits, you give yourself another powerful tool for showing your readers who and what your viewpoint character really is... in his heart of hearts, in that secret place within himself where there can be no lies or deception.

  Of course the converse of what we've just been talking about is also true. You must not only establish and reiterate the viewpoint constantly with the proper kinds of constructions, but you must also make sure that nothing slips into your copy by accident that might lead the reader to assume the viewpoint has moved anywhere else.

  If Bob is still your viewpoint character, for example, but you want to show that his boss, Max, is worried about the speech Bob is about to give, you cannot throw in a sentence like, "Max was worried about the speech." That construction implies that we are momentarily in Max's viewpoint.

  How do we get around the problem? Two possibilities come immediately to mind:

  "As he walked to the podium, Bob remembered how worried Max had said he was about the speech."

  Or:

  "Walking to the podium, Bob glanced at Max and saw the worried frown on his face."

  In either case, we've conveyed the information about Max's worry without risk of losing our reader's sense of where the viewpoint is.

  You would do well, I think, to test yourself on how you handle viewpoint, since it's such a vital technique in fiction. Here's one way you can do it.

  Select a few pages of your own fiction copy. Then go through it with colored pencils and mark it up as follows:

  Underline the name of your viewpoint character in red.

  Underline in red every statement that clearly defines that character's viewpoint ("He saw," "she heard," "he thought," "she felt," "he intended" and the like).

  Look for any intended or accidental statements establishing any other viewpoint. If you find a second viewpoint, underline that character's name in green, and then underline in the same color all the words that establish his viewpoint.

  At this point, if you have found more than one viewpoint, get it out of there! Rewrite, if necessary, to make it all a single viewpoint.

  Learning to handle viewpoint well is a crucial step for any fiction writer. It can be troublesome at first, but later it becomes second nature. That's good, because learning it is a necessity. For without good handling of viewpoint, your readers may forget whose story it is—and you might, too!

  14. DON'T LECTURE YOUR READER

  THERE YOU ARE, DEEP in your story somewhere, and you realize that there's some vital information that your readers really ought to know. So you write something like:

  Charlie had no way of knowing this, but it is a well-documented fact that Type A personalities suffer a high incidence of heart attacks, and his enemy Sam was definitely a Type A personality. Sam's troubles had begun early in his life, and an examination of his early background provides an interesting example of how compulsive Type A behavior can be destructive....

  It's probably pretty obvious to you that this kind of lecture doesn't fit very well into contemporary fiction. There was a time, in the earliest days of the novel, and before the modern short story had begun to assume its present form, when a fiction writer could address "You, dear reader," and speak author-to-reader like a stage lecturer might speak to an audience. But fiction has become much more sophisticated since those long gone days, and readers now won't stand for lectures by the author.

  Why? For at least two reasons: First, lectures by the author violate every principle of viewpoint, as just discussed in the two preceding chapters; second, such lectures completely stop the forward movement of the story, and so distract the reader from the plot, where he should be focused.

  Another possible reason for avoiding author lectures in your fiction: you may find yourself deviating from the fictioneer's goal—the telling of a story—to that of a pamphleteer, which is trying to sell a belief. Fiction may convince readers about some moral, ethical or political issue, but if it does, the convincing is a by-product of the tale-telling. Fiction does not exist primarily to convince anybody of anything; it exists to tell a story, and by so doing to illuminate the human condition.

  Let me make a suggestion: if you ever find yourself saying that you are writing a story to "prove" something political or whatever, shelve that story instantly, and don't work on it again until you can write it for its own sake.

  Of course writers of fiction care about issues of the day. Often they have very, very strong opinions. But the published writers entertain. They don't write to prove anything. If their story happens incidentally to say something thematic, that's grand. Most stories do end up implying some idea or feeling. But the convincing—if any happens—is a by-product of the storytelling process, and cannot be its goal or the story almost certainly will come out like a very bad Sunday sermon rather than as a story.

  So perhaps you have been convinced not to try to use fiction as a delivery system for your opinions. A soapbox is better. But what about those inadvertent, well-meaning technical slips that might also read like a lecture in your copy?

  These are sometimes harder to catch. As we've mentioned in Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, you'll establish a viewpoint and write in such a way as to remind the reader often where that viewpoint is. It should be relatively easy for you to slip in material that you the author want in the story as long as the viewpoint character needs to think about it.

  What do I mean here? Simply this: Faced with the need to work some factual material into her story, the good writer does not say, "How can I
get this into the story?" Instead, she asks herself, "Why does my viewpoint character need to learn (or recall) this information?" Or, "How can I get the viewpoint character to notice what I want noticed here?" Which is quite different from sitting back as the author and shoveling in data.

  The more you practice your handling of viewpoint, the easier and more like second nature it will become. The more solidly you're writing in viewpoint, the less likely it is that you'll launch into a distracting lecture by the author.

  Look for lectures in your fiction. They tend to be chunks of information that you the writer stuck in there because of what you wanted in the story—rather than what the viewpoint character would be thinking or dealing with. If or when you find such obtrusive chunks of author intervention, figure out how to get them in through the viewpoint.

  Ask yourself such questions as:

  • What can happen in the story to make my viewpoint character remember this?

  • What can happen to make my viewpoint character seek out and get this information in the story "now"?

  • What other character might come in to tell this information to my viewpoint character—and why?

  • What other source can my viewpoint character come upon to bring out this desired information? (A newspaper story, for example, or TV news bulletin.)

  There are always ways you can devise to avoid dumping information into the story via the author lecture route. There are always ways... and you must always find one of them.