Hey guys. Megan Tennant here. Welcome back to my channel. I've got another video for
you guys, obviously, since I'm here talking to you.
Today's gonna be a fun video and when I say fun I mean fun for you. Today's video
of course you probably already know because you probably read the title cuz
you're smart like that, is me talking about my very personal seven newbie
writer mistakes. Number one Pantsers out there are gonna
hate me for saying this but my newbie writer mistake number one was not
outlining. So my first book that I started writing was Aletheia but back
when I started writing it it wasn't called Aletheia and it was a very very
very different book. And it started like two books earlier than Aletheia
currently starts.It was bad times. But I had a good idea and I had a good world
and I was just ready to dive into it and just do it but I didn't have a plan.
I didn't think I needed a plan. So I just sat down and I started writing. And I kept
writing. And I got like five chapters in and I still had no idea where the book
was going and the characters were still in the same clearing where they started. It
was bad. Shh didn't happen. Outlining instantly
one: gave my book direction and an actual plot and flow. But it also helped me
realize before I put the work into it where there were gonna be plot holes and
where there were missing gaps. It allowed me to fix these issues before I hit them.
Outlining. Do it. So I went and I followed my outline. Things were going great.
I wrote fifteen chapters and then I decided that I wanted to change my tense
from past tense to present tense and that was fine. I went back. I kind of
changed the tense. Then I decided I wanted to make it first person and I
wanted to make it past tense again. Then I wrote another chapter and then I
decided that I wanted to be first person present tense. So that was a lot of time
that went into that and I could have saved all of that time if I had stopped
and just taken you know a day or two to actually
think about what kind of POV and tense I wanted because once I stopped and
thought about it it was an easy answer. Newbie writer mistake number three. This
one still haunts me and by still haunts me I mean I have drawers full of just
the skeletons of this mistake. Not organizing my ideas.
I love world building. It's my thing and character building and backstory. I love it
so much. So when I first started writing I was just, I was just pouring out ideas
onto just random pieces of paper. So I just started accumulating these pages
worth of ideas into a folder and then next thing I knew I had multiple folders.
I can't throw them away because what if they're really good but every time I go
to try to sort through them I can't bring myself to do it because you guys
haven't seen my handwriting but it's really bad. I have terrible handwriting
and none of the pages are titled so you pick up a page you don't know if it's
backstory or about a character or about a world. Sometimes I'll pick up a page and
it's not even about Aletheia or the seventh river series, it's about some
other random book idea I had out of the blue. I think it's like 600 pages of this
stuff and I don't know what to do with it. I still honestly haven't solved this
issue so maybe it's not so much a newbie writer mistake as it is just a Megan
flaw in general. I'm bad at organization. It's getting better.
I haven't solved it yet. Newbie writer mistake number four. When I started
writing I was so concerned with not being able to write enough words that I
ran into the mistake where by the end of Aletheia I had too many words and I'd
never even stopped to consider that I'd have to cut things. So it ended up being
really long and I cut it back some but even then it's still kind of long. It
clocks in at about 500 pages that is a bit long for a dystopian book. Granted
it's like more new adult dystopian so it gets to be a little longer than YA.
But if in the beginning I'd considered the fact that that was a possibility I
might have cut back a bit in my outline cut out some scenes condensed some things.
But it just never even crossed my mind that that was something I should be
paying attention to or be worried about. Newbie writing mistake number five.
Luckily I learned my way around this one pretty quickly and that was starting
without learning the basics of writing. I decided I wanted to write a book and I
just sat down and started writing I didn't pause to look up writing tips.
Luckily just a couple months in I found Authortube and I just started binge
watching authortube videos. But what you don't want to do is start writing and
end up with a whole book worth and then go out and learn basic writing tips and
realize that they're strewn throughout your entire book and you have to go back
and fix them all and some of them might be baked into your plot itself and into
your characters and their unfixable without just doing a full rewrite. Newbie
mistake number six not keeping track of character profiles, details, or
information. This is something that I'm still working on correcting after
Aletheia because you know when you're in the first book and you're creating these
characters the details are fresh in your mind and you're thinking that you're not
gonna forget them because how could you? How could you forget the eye color of
one of your favorite side characters? But then you know you finish the book and
you edit the book and you publish the book and a couple months go by and you
realize that you actually don't remember the eye color of that one side character
that you thought you knew so well and then you have to go back and you have to
dig through your own book to find it. Keep track of the character profiles
from the start. And I am doing that from now on forward. I didn't do that
for Aletheia and so now I get to go back and reread Aletheia a billion times so I can
remember all the little details . If the scar was on the right side of his face
in the first book it's gotta be on the right side of his face in the later
books because people who've binge read your series will notice that stuff and
it will make them very very angry. Newbie writer mistake number seven
is not knowing the difference between tropes and cliches. People are scared to
read dystopian because all the cliches. So I set out just dead dead set on
purging anything that even resembled the cliche from my book. I went through and
I read... I spent like two weeks reading through every single list and watching
every single video and every single reddit comment of anyone ever
complaining about a dystopian cliche and trying to engrave each of them in my
mind trying to avoid them, put twists on them, flip them a little on their heads,
and in that also losing most of the tropes which causes some issues in theme
and just relatability of a story. If you hate dystopian cliches go read Aletheia.
Yeah it's probably a good idea but if you really like dystopian tropes I kind
of over murdered them all. This was a very personal Megan issue I don't think
this is something a lot of people face but in summary cut out cliches but don't
slice out all of the tropes from your story. So yes those are my greatest newbie
writer mistakes. You can bask in the glory of knowing those now. If you share
these mistakes let me know in the comments down below so I can feel better
about them. I'm kidding you don't have to do that. I won't make you. If you want to see
more of this give it a thumbs up give it a share. I'll do a part 2 part 3 part 4. I
don't know how many newbie writer mistakes I had but I feel like I can go
on for at least 4 more videos of sets of seven so if you liked this thumbs up,
that's how I know that I should do more. So yeah if you're not subscribed,
subscribe. If you are subscribed there's a bell it does things and yeah thank you
guys for watching and I will see you in the next video!