Interest Stacks

Mistake: DIDN'T WRITE CHRONOLOGICALLY


Oh boy. I know some people do this religiously, and there's nothing wrong with that - I personally will never attempt this again.

When paired with the previous 2 mistakes, this was a recipe for disaster.

And a disaster it was.

Mistake: NEVER DECIDED ON INCENTIVATING THE INCIDENT


hading 2 or 3 events/ideas that I wrote which could count as an inciting incident. If I had sat down to plot this novel out for a second, I would have noticed the discrepancy.

In my second draft, three years later of this has been pushed into the backstory. all

Mistake: READ MY CHARACTERS WRONG


For the story to work, I had to almost entirely flip the personalities of the two leads. I kept forcing certain archetypes on them when that wasn't who they needed to be for this story to work.

Now, they're stronger and much more complex.

Mistake: DID NOT PLOT IT PROPERLY


All I had was a bunch of ideas with threadbare connections to each other, that I sorta-kinda knew approximately when they might happen.

Now, I don't think I needed to spend days or weeks plotting this. But. At least having a one page overview to make sure I hit all the important beats would have been helpful.

You'll see how my following problems developed from here.

Mistake: THE PROTAGONIST WAS AN OBSERVER


I tried to convince myself that he wasn't he was going to go through a change, too. But his own story simply wasn't strong enough to excuse him being the narrator.

I didn't change his role of the observer in the second draft, but I did push it much further, to where it's now the main problem of the story, and the story is his, no matter how much he tries to put it on other people.

Mistake: USED INCONSISTENT NARRATIVE POSITIONS


I tried to be creative, but really I was just too lazy to properly understand all narrative perspectives and use them to my advantage.

This resulted in head-hopping and made the whole story feel untethered.

Mistake: SWITCHED TENSES

This is a very common mistake and I stepped right into it. I wrote in present tense, but slipped into past like it was nobody's business. Yikes.

I did realize this quite quickly (only a few chapters into it), so I managed to fix it without too much hassle.