5 Common Writing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Writing is a great art, in the sense that all you really need is a place to put down your ideas. Sometimes the execution is bad, though, and though you might be the next Shakespeare, you're coming across as the next Dan Brown. With that in mind, it should always be in your best interest to refine your skills. Here's how.

5: Using the passive voice

This one is big enough to merit its own post. Does the subject in your sentence perform the action, or is the action performed upon it? Although there is a lot that is affected by this aspect in itself, the way to fix it is pretty simple. Here are a few examples.

Passive: It is believed by Mexicans that ghosts can speak with us.

Active: Mexicans believe that ghosts can speak with us.

Passive: I was bitten by the puppy.

Active: The puppy bit me.

The passive voice can be useful every once in a while, most of all if you want to keep the emphasis in the action, or if the actor is unknown. Otherwise, you risk sounding vague.

4: Too much exposition

Imagine that I wrote my posts with two thousand words of intro. Odds are, you'd skip all the way ahead to the good part, or just close the window with no hard feelings. And let's be real, when you're reading a book, do you usually begin with the preface or do you just skip it and go straight to the beginning of the story?

I know, the world you've built from the ground up is pretty exciting, and you've done your best to make it believable. Maybe you have a timeline in which you explain everything in it, from its creation, all the way to the main events in your protagonist's life. Maybe you even have elaborate charts that tell you everything about your characters so you can easily access that information in case you need to.

Truth be told, some of my favorite books have an excess of exposition, of the more notorious ones being Tolkien with Lord of the Rings. I swear, sometimes you can skip five pages ahead, and the story would still be in the same place. Now, that man is a master at description. His world is insanely well-made; he's earned the right for some exposition. Have you?

If we're reading your book, we're interested in learning about your world. We're not interested in a lecture. The best way to reveal the way the world works is through your characters. Dialogue, actions, lifestyles, sometimes even the smallest of details can paint a vivid picture of how everyday life can be; if you're creative, you can easily find a way to explain the world that doesn't involve explaining it directly.

Show, don't tell. 

3: No internal consistency

Fiction is, by definition, unrealistic. Sometimes you just want it to happen in a world with rules just like ours, and those can be bent out of shape to allow for a few extraordinary moments. There are other times when your idea is so far out that, by necessity, that place will need to have its own set of rules. That doesn't mean a world can break its own rules, though.

Take a universe like Harry Potter, where students can't use magic outside of Hogwarts under threat of being expelled. When Harry is summoned to the ministry to face a trial for having used magic, even if it meant defending his cousin from a monster, that is good internal consistency because the world is following its own rules. When they fight Death Eaters and aren't bothered at all, it's the opposite.

The way to avoid this is to always be aware of what can or can't happen in your universe. Is there a magic system? How does it work? How is it limited? Can anybody do it, or is it limited to a few? Everything that makes your universe what it is must be scrutinized in such a way that you can't use any surprises to get your characters out of trouble.

In a universe with vague magic like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones, Deus ex machina is pretty common because the audience is never fully aware of what can happen. Meanwhile, someone like Brandon Sanderson will leave little room for surprise because the systems he creates are well-explained, and he sticks to it. This goes beyond magic systems and can be used for things like powers, gravity, science, etc.

2: Two-dimensional characters

It's hard to convince a person to feel anything for a bit of text. Just like the biblical God, you'll usually create characters in your own image, at least in parts. If every character in your story feels the same, or if they seem to exist for a single purpose, like a comedic relief or any archetype that has been played to death, then you didn't really make a character, but a caricature, and you need to develop them further.

The biggest tool you can use is empathy. You always have to be aware of how your characters are, and what they would do in a certain type of situation. They're bound to have strong opinions, so when a conflict of interest comes up, they need to act the way they would, and not the way which would be convenient for you. Don't forget the small stuff, either. Everyday actions make us human.

1: Mixing up the tense 

Has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like? 

Sure, some sentences sound better in the present tense, and some sounded sound better in the past tense. When you're reading a story that consistently changes between one and the other, though, you'll be easily confused. Any of the two tenses works for most stories, although suspenseful stories can make more of an effective use of the present tense with the uncertainty of the future, but that's more of a stylistic choice than anything else. If you know what you're doing, you could even mix the past and present tense, but that's a pretty big risk grammar-wise.

This one's simple enough to solve. Read the text out loud, and just make sure that you're either sticking to the present or the past tense.

There are many more mistakes that one can make, but it's better to eat an elephant one bite at a time. In the meantime, work on your skill. Whenever you catch yourself doing any of these, do yourself a favor and correct it. Read it out loud. Practice makes perfect, and when you're consciously looking out for better ways to put your ideas on paper, you'll definitely find them.