How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide

by Howard Mittelmark

If you find yourself unable to escape a Waiting Room, look honestly at your novel and consider what the first important event is. Everything before that event can probably be cut.

While it is your job to know a great deal about your characters, it is seldom necessary to share it all with the reader, and by “seldom,” we mean “never.”

Strokes of good luck and mind-boggling coincidences can be used when that is what your novel is about. A character whose problems are miraculously resolved when he finds a duffel bag filled with unmarked currency will be received by the reader very differently than a character whose problems begin when he finds the money.

the more unlikely an event, the more deeply rooted and widely integrated it should be into the chapters that came before it.

Early twentieth-century fiction was newly awash in Freudianism,

A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

When action is early twentieth century, however, caution dictates that the character should make a call on a period phone early in the novel

Endings are the last refuge of the implausible,

This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina, which is French for “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Looking in the mirror, Joe saw a tall, brown-haired man, trapped in a poorly written novel.”

People don’t notice what they see every day; they see what’s different, and the reader, on some level, will balk.

The well-chosen detail is always more effective than the exhaustive inventory.

Characters can certainly be provided with some history. But the relationship between that history and their behavior should be more complex than Pavlovian dog psychology.

Like a small business, a novel cannot afford to carry dead weight, even if it is a close family member.

Often, at the key moment of confrontation, the villain suddenly collapses, seemingly tuckered out by all his energetic villainy. The good guys, having been helpless to defeat the antagonist for 200 pages, now poke him gently and he obligingly deflates, seemingly aware that this is the climax of the book, and that’s his job.

There is nothing wrong with making the occasional reader occasionally reach for the dictionary. However, the only legitimate reason to do that is if the word you have chosen is the best word to express the idea. Generally, saying “edifice” instead of “building” doesn’t tell your reader anything more about the building; it tells the reader that you know the word edifice.

Using a word almost correctly, or using a word almost exactly like the right word, amounts to almost speaking English.

Ornate prose is an idiosyncrasy of certain writers rather than a pinnacle all writers are working toward.

A humorous or ornately embroidered passage that takes the reader out of the novel to reflect on the author’s brilliance is likely to be a bug, rather than a feature. In fact, whenever you are particularly taken with a bit of your own cleverness, it is not a bad idea to stop and consider whether it serves your novel or you.

Anything that draws attention to the author at the expense of her novel is bad parenting.

Getting individual words wrong can make you sound illiterate; getting idioms wrong can make you sound as if you don’t speak English.

Often, one of these boilerplate phrases is perfectly acceptable. To say that somebody is “drop-dead gorgeous” conveys an idea without distracting attention from the general thrust of the narrative. There is a critical point, however, at which the constant use of off-the-shelf phrases saps the life from your writing.

In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it.

Sometimes an author understands in principle that description is necessary but does not grasp the difference between description and inventory.

It is fine to show the world of your novel refracted through the reactions of your characters—but we still want to see the world, not just those reactions. The reactions themselves must be vividly described if they are to mean anything to the reader.

“But I want to represent life in all its mundane, stultifying detail!” you might protest, “And that’s how real people speak.” True, but those very same people will not sit still to read it. As a novelist you are always selecting what to leave out and what to put in, and just as you don’t mention it every time your hero blinks, you should generally leave out the information-thin social niceties.

In commercial fiction, if you wish to use an omniscient point of view, you must first create an authorial voice that belongs to the omniscient narrator, not to any (or all) of the characters. From this base, you can dip into people’s thoughts at will, but for this to work, you must develop a deft control of point-of-view shifts. If you simply jump from head to head as the mood strikes you, the voice becomes a fractured mess.

Your character can win the lottery (find the bag of money, inherit the castle) if your novel is about a character winning the lottery, just as readers will accept an alien invasion if that is what the book is about, but not if it is randomly introduced late in a novel about agrarian reform

Historical research has the same status as all background information. The author must know it, even if it does not appear directly in the novel. Otherwise, the characters won’t seem like people, and the setting won’t seem like a place.

Above all, symbols should not be obvious. While a novel cannot do without plot or characters, your novel should work perfectly well for someone who doesn’t notice the symbols at all.

Unpublished authors tend to be more concerned than published authors about the possibility that somebody might steal their ideas. This is because published authors know that there is no end of ideas, and what you’re selling is largely in the execution.