10 Common Mistakes New Writers Make (And How to Fix Them)

Here's something nobody tells beginning writers: the mistakes you're making are the same ones almost every writer makes. They're not signs that you lack talent. They're signs that you're learning.

The difference between a struggling beginner and a confident writer often isn't raw ability — it's awareness. Once you can identify these patterns in your own work, you can fix them. And once you fix them, your writing improves dramatically.

Here are the ten most common mistakes I see new writers make, with specific, actionable fixes for each.

1. Starting the Story Too Early

**The mistake:** Opening with your character waking up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, and driving to work before anything interesting happens. Or worse, opening with a prologue that's really just backstory.

**Why it happens:** You want readers to know your character before the action starts. Logical instinct, wrong approach.

**The fix:** Start as close to the inciting incident as possible. Your story should begin when something changes — when the normal routine breaks.

Compare:

❌ "Sarah woke up to her alarm at 7 AM. She brushed her teeth, made coffee, and drove to the office. It was a normal Tuesday — until she found the body."

✅ "The body was in Sarah's office chair, posed like it was waiting for a meeting."

The second version drops us into the moment that matters. We'll learn about Sarah's morning routine later — if it's even relevant.

Kurt Vonnegut's advice: "Start as close to the end as possible."

2. Telling Instead of Showing (But Not When You Think)

**The mistake:** "She was angry." "He felt sad." "The town was creepy." Naming emotions and qualities instead of demonstrating them.

**The nuance:** "Show don't tell" is the most repeated and most misunderstood writing advice. You shouldn't show everything — sometimes telling is more efficient. "Three years passed" is better shown as telling than as three chapters of filler.

**The fix:** Show emotions and important moments. Tell transitions and minor details.

❌ "John was nervous about the interview."

✅ "John checked his tie in the elevator's reflection for the third time. His resume was creased where he'd been gripping it."

The second version never says "nervous" but communicates it more vividly. The reader feels John's anxiety rather than being told about it.

**When telling is fine:** "They drove for three hours and arrived at dusk." Not every moment needs to be dramatized.

3. Purple Prose and Over-Description

**The mistake:** "The luminous, crystalline orb of incandescent celestial illumination cast its ethereal, gossamer radiance upon the obsidian-dark waters of the ancient, fathomless lake."

That's the moon reflecting on a lake.

**Why it happens:** You're trying to write "beautifully." You've read literary fiction and want that rich, immersive quality. Completely understandable.

**The fix:** Strong writing is specific and precise, not decorated. Choose one or two vivid details rather than describing everything.

❌ "Her gorgeous, flowing, raven-black hair cascaded like a dark waterfall over her delicate, porcelain-white shoulders."

✅ "Her dark hair was loose, brushing her shoulders when she turned."

Read your descriptions aloud. If they sound like a thesaurus exploded, cut back. The goal is to create a vivid image, not demonstrate your vocabulary.

Elmore Leonard's rule: "If it sounds like writing, rewrite it."

4. Dialogue That Doesn't Sound Like Speech

**The mistake:** Characters who speak in perfect paragraphs, never interrupt each other, and conveniently explain things both characters already know.

**The classic offender:** "As you know, Bob, our company was founded in 1987 by my father, who invented the quantum stabilizer, which is the device we're now trying to improve."

Nobody talks like that.

The fix:

- Read your dialogue aloud. If it sounds unnatural coming out of your mouth, rewrite it. - People speak in fragments, interrupt each other, and trail off. - Characters shouldn't all sound the same. A teenager doesn't talk like a professor. - Avoid using dialogue as an exposition dump. - "Said" is invisible. Don't replace it with "exclaimed," "proclaimed," "ejaculated" (yes, old novels actually used this), or "stated" unless there's a real reason.

Good dialogue exercise: go to a café, listen to real conversations, and notice how messy and indirect actual speech is.

5. Too Many Adverbs

**The mistake:** "'I hate you!' she said angrily." "He walked slowly across the room." "She carefully opened the ancient door."

**Why it's a problem:** Adverbs often signal that the verb isn't doing its job. "Said angrily" means you should find a better way to show anger. "Walked slowly" could be "shuffled," "crept," or "dragged his feet."

**The fix:** Replace adverb + weak verb with a single strong verb.

- "Ran quickly" → "sprinted" or "bolted" - "Said quietly" → "whispered" or "murmured" - "Looked angrily" → "glared" - "Ate quickly" → "wolfed down" or "inhaled"

This isn't an absolute rule — sometimes an adverb is the clearest, most efficient choice. But if every sentence has one, you have a problem.

6. One-Dimensional Villains

**The mistake:** The villain is evil because... they're evil. They want to destroy the world because... they're evil. They kick puppies and monologue about their plans because that's what villains do.

**The fix:** Give your antagonist a motivation that makes sense from their perspective. The best villains believe they're the hero of their own story.

- Thanos believes he's saving the universe from overpopulation. - Javert in *Les Misérables* genuinely believes in the law above all else. - Amy Dunne in *Gone Girl* has specific, personal reasons for her actions.

Ask yourself: if I wrote the story from the villain's perspective, would their choices make sense? If not, their motivation needs work.

Bonus: the most chilling villains are the ones readers almost agree with.

7. Inconsistent Point of View

**The mistake:** Writing in third person limited (following one character's thoughts) and suddenly revealing what another character is thinking. This is called "head-hopping" and it disorients readers.

**Example of head-hopping:** "Mark thought she looked beautiful. Sarah noticed his stare and felt uncomfortable, wondering if she had something on her face."

We jumped from Mark's head to Sarah's head mid-paragraph. Pick one.

**The fix:** Choose your POV and stick with it within each scene (or chapter, depending on your structure).

- **First person:** "I walked into the room." Intimate, limited to one character's knowledge. - **Third person limited:** "She walked into the room and noticed the smell immediately." Follows one character's experience. - **Third person omniscient:** The narrator knows everything. This can include multiple characters' thoughts, but it's a distinct narrative voice (like a storyteller), not random head-hopping.

If you want multiple perspectives, use scene breaks or chapter breaks to switch POV characters. George R.R. Martin does this masterfully in *A Song of Ice and Fire* — each chapter is clearly one character's perspective.

8. Info Dumps and Backstory Overload

**The mistake:** Stopping the story to explain three pages of history, worldbuilding, or character backstory. Often found in the first chapter, disguised as "setup."

**The fix:** Reveal information when it becomes relevant, not before. Trust your reader to keep up.

**The trick:** If the reader needs to know that the two kingdoms have been at war for decades, reveal it through a character's experience of that war — a checkpoint crossing, a hostile encounter, a scar. Don't open with a history lecture.

J.K. Rowling doesn't explain the entire wizarding world in chapter one of *Harry Potter*. Harry discovers it gradually, and so does the reader. By the time you understand Quidditch, you've read 100 pages and didn't even notice the worldbuilding.

9. Abandoning Stories Before Finishing Them

**The mistake:** Starting a novel, getting to 20,000 words, losing enthusiasm, and starting a shiny new project. Repeat forever. Never finish anything.

**Why it happens:** The beginning of a story is exciting — everything is possible. The middle is where reality sets in and the work gets hard. A new idea always seems better than the one you're struggling with.

**The fix:** Commit to finishing before starting something new. A finished, imperfect story teaches you more than ten abandoned beginnings.

Practical strategies: - Keep a "shiny ideas" notebook. When a new idea hits mid-project, write it down and go back to your current work. - Lower your standards for the first draft. It doesn't have to be good — it has to be done. - Set a word count goal and track it daily. - Tell someone your deadline. External accountability works.

10. Not Reading Enough

**The mistake:** Wanting to write but not reading widely in your genre (or at all).

**Why this matters:** Reading is how you internalize story structure, pacing, voice, and genre conventions. Writers who don't read produce work that feels disconnected from what readers actually want.

**The fix:** Read actively in your genre. Not just for enjoyment — study the craft.

When you read a book you love, ask: - How did the author handle the opening? - When did I feel the most tension? Why? - How was backstory revealed? - What made me keep turning pages?

When you read a book that doesn't work, ask: - Where did I lose interest? - What felt off about the characters or pacing? - What would I have done differently?

Aim for at least one book per month in your genre. More is better. Stephen King reads 70-80 books a year and considers it essential to his craft.

The Takeaway

Every single mistake on this list is something published, successful authors made early in their careers. The difference is they identified the patterns and worked to fix them.

Pick the two or three mistakes from this list that resonate most with your own writing. Focus on those in your next project. Don't try to fix everything at once — that's paralyzing. Improvement is incremental.

The fact that you're reading about craft means you care about getting better. That already puts you ahead of most aspiring writers. Now go write something, make new and interesting mistakes, and keep improving.