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

by Howard Mittelmark

There was a time when a book could be sold purely because its author had been to distant climes and had returned to tell of the exotic sights he had seen. That author was Marco Polo, and the time was the thirteenth century.

The good news is that as a writer of fiction you get to create your world from scratch. The bad news is that because you create your world from scratch, everything in it is a conscious choice, and the reader will assume that there is some reason behind these choices.

Any scene can be killed by description of every meaningless component of whatever action the character undertakes. As in Zeno’s Paradox, in which an arrow never reaches its target because it must always travel half the remaining distance, the reader begins to feel as if the end is further and further away.

This is often why I skim sex scenes.

Protagonists should only be as nice as everyday people are in real life. Making them nicer than the average reader will earn the reader’s loathing, or make her laugh in disbelief.

What nonsense. As if nice people don't have other flaws. As if the niceness mean doesn't mean there ARE very nice people, as well as terrible ones. Geesh.

Nigel Tufnel in This Is Spinal Tap memorably pointed out that there is a fine line between clever and stupid. The harder you try to be clever, the more momentum you will have when you arrive at that line, and the less likely you are to notice when you cross it.

In real life, the physical world effortlessly exists and is visible without anyone’s help. In fiction, unless you describe it, it’s not there.

Some writers are convinced that since great modern authors like Joyce and Faulkner are difficult to understand, writing that is difficult to understand is therefore great writing. This is a form of magical thinking, analogous to the belief that the warrior who dons the pelt of a lion thereby acquires its strength and cunning.

Adverbs don’t kill dialogue; careless writers kill dialogue.

The novice unpublished novelist chips away at the prospect of publication one element at a time. The truly masterful unpublished novelist, though, has the vision to safeguard his amateur standing with one broad stroke: choosing a narrative perspective that is completely wrong for his story.

Writers who try to write from the point of view of a character who is smarter than they are should consider asking that character if this is a good idea before proceeding.

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess.

While sex and humor are both very difficult to realize on the page, it is all too easy to realize humor while trying to realize sex.

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.

Writing a novel is a very personal experience, but selling a novel is business.

Carts and horses work best when placed in the traditional order.