hey guys what's up welcome back to the channel. My name is Megan Tennant in case
you didn't already know. If you guys have followed this channel you know that I
covered two topics very similar to this one but with one very very key
difference. They were mistakes that I myself had made because I wanted you
guys to know that no one's perfect. The thing is I didn't make all of the
mistakes that would make me perfect at messing up which no one's perfect at anything.
So there were things that I missed in those videos which I still want to cover.
So today we are covering my top 9 newbie mistakes which I personally did not make
or at least I don't think I made. I'm gonna count the list backwards of course
cuz that's what we're doing now so let's start with newbie writing mistake
number 9 adding details that don't matter. As writers when we write our
first story it's generally something that's been in our head for years
because most writers when they get their first idea they don't think "you know
what I'm gonna throw myself completely into this super stressful career path
where making a living is gonna be a constant struggle and no one's gonna
take me seriously until I make it" they don't do that. But that means that by the
time we actually sit down and we start putting that story onto paper it's been
in our heads for a long time which means some scenes are more fleshed out than
they need to be and some characters have way more details tied to them than they
should have. You might care a whole lot about how this character keeps running
into these little dragons that are supposed to be bad omens and you think
that's this really just neat little detail and you wanted for so long to get
it onto paper that of course you're gonna put it on paper the thing is any
piece of information you include in your writing your audience is going to assume
it's important in some way whether it be for character growth or plot or a key
theme or something that's foreshadowing that's gonna come back
later they're gonna take that information they're gonna catalog it in
their brain unconsciously and it's gonna be bouncing around in there and they're
going to wait for it to become important and then when those details don't lead
anywhere your audience is going to be very frustrated and the more you
reference something in any detail the more you build it up and if that build
up goes to nowhere important your audience is gonna be annoyed because
they cataloged that information they've kept track of it and then they ended up
not even needing it because it wasn't relevant to the story. Number eight under
estimating your audience. As writers we often have this overwhelming fear that
what if the audience just doesn't get it so to correct for this a lot of newbie
writers beat the audience over the head with the information. If you feed them
too much information or too many overly clear clues or foreshadowing they're
gonna start to feel like a child and they're going to start to interpret your
work with a bit less respect so make sure all of your foreshadowing is just
that a shadow. You want your audience to be thinking about your story after they
walk away from it which means there needs to be something in it for them to
critically analyze so if you lay everything out plain as day in front of
them there's nothing for them to need to think about and therefore when they walk
away your story won't be in their head which means they're unlikely to come
back. Trust in them to be able to come to conclusions and make assumptions on
their own. Beta readers and beta viewers are your best bet here because that's
the best way to kind of know what assumptions and conclusions your target
audience is drawing and that way you can know if you need to give a little more
information or a little less. Number seven is under describing and this happens
most commonly in visuals specifically in books and that's because sometimes these
new writers tend to forget that the audience is coming in blind. You may have
had these locations in your head for years and you see them plain as day but
your audience doesn't. But still in a lot of debut novels you'll see characters
arrive at a new location and we get one line or sometimes two
lines describing the location which isn't enough for us as readers to
picture it. Which means they're just viewing the characters as sort of
walking through a white space or floating heads and that's going to
completely break their immersion they're going to realize that they're reading a
book and they're not going to be pulled into it the way you want. Number six
forgetting the other senses. "I see dead people" Not that one I mean unless you're writing that
type of story in which case yes that's a sense that you're gonna have to pay
attention to but generally speaking most writers remember sight and sound cuz
those are kind of always present in our lives so we think of it first but most
writers tend to forget smell touch and one of my all-time favorites which even
seasoned writers tend to forget and that is temperature and that's not a sense
but I'm just plugging it in here anyways. Also other environmental factors like
how moist is the air? Is it super humid? Is it super dry? And pressure.
Are they on top of the mountain for the first time? If they are it's gonna feel
kind of light. Your audience will feel much more tied to your story if you give
them information that ties to all of their senses plus it gives them just key
details about the world. Is winter coming? That's something that could be very
relevant to your story later on so have your character get a chill every once in
a while just to remind your audience that winter is coming.
Number five forgetting injuries. You'll have a character who gets a cracked rib
and then a day later within the context of the story which is actually quite a
few scenes later that character laughs and they don't even flinch and there's
no description of the pain. Any type of lasting effect on your character, injury,
drunkenness, grief, write it down. Write down where it happened if you have your
entire story planned out you can write down how long it's going to last so you
know when to stop describing it. If you don't have that planned out then just
check back on the list every time you go to write more but keep track of any sort
of lasting effect. Number four using overly fancy words for
no reason besides just sounding fancy especially in
first-person narrative. If your character is a slave trapped in a
compound and they've had very little education and they're in a dog-eat-dog
type world they're not gonna use a word like fornicate they're going to say the f word and
if your age range where you can't use the word you're gonna have to find a
more PG way to say it without using a fancy word like fornicate and good luck
to you with that. I think the f word is just a better overall word for that situation.
Nowadays we're pretty much exclusively writing to entertain. Yes there's
generally a message and an underlying theme but we're writing for people's
enjoyment which means if they have to stop consuming your content to go and
Google the meaning of a word their immersion is being broken and any time you
break your audience's immersion you risk losing them forever so don't do
that. Plus most of us realize that if you're using overly large synonym words
you're doing it just to sound astute and we will judge you. Number three no clear
plot line. A very common thing in the writing of newbies is that readers end
up feeling like they're rowing down a river in a boat blindfolded. They know
they'll probably get to the end and that the river will take them there but
there's the annoyance and anxiety of not being able to see the path ahead. You
want to give the reader twists and turns but you also want to tease them with the
knowledge that there's going to be Rapids and there's going to be a
waterfall and you also want them to know kind of what general direction the river
is going in and how long is the river going to be are they going to be on the
river for the entirety of the story or are they gonna have to walk a ways. You
don't want them to be completely in the dark. Tell them why they're on the river.
For them to be invested they need to know what the overall plan is and even
if that plan changes throughout the story that's fine but at any given point
they should know kind of where they're hoping to get. Number two trying too hard
to be original. Yes that's an issue some people hit. I have seen this so many
times on Twitter: a writer posting about how excited they are about a story and
then suddenly they're posting tweets having a breakdown because they've
either seen or heard of another story that has a very similar component
to their own. Maybe your book happened to have a zombie-like disease that works in
large part by taking away people's memories and then you read Aletheia
and you thought "I'm doing that I can't do that anymore
she's doing that everyone will think I'm copying it's plagiarism" but you know
what if you have that idea before reading Aletheia then there's pretty
much no way your idea's gonna end up playing out the same way as mine.
You could give the exact same writing prompt to ten different writers and none of
those stories are going to end up the same because every writer is different.
We're all pulling on different archives of experience and we each have our own
voices so try your best to be original but don't panic when you find something
in your work that matches with someone else's especially because it's pretty
much impossible to do something truly original. Unless you stole it most people
are gonna be able to tell that you didn't steal it so it doesn't matter.
There are so many stories out there in the world everything has been told in
some way or another especially given just the nature of
storytelling itself is replicated across tons of work. I did a video kind of on
the hero's journey you can check it out I'll link in the description down below
but any hero's tale has very similar if not the exact same plot beats and they
emerged on their own across the world across time because we're all human and
our brains work in a kind of similar way and that was just a pattern of
storytelling that we all really enjoyed. So don't be afraid to have similarities
between your work and other people's. And last but not least number one common
newbie mistake is self plug or wish-fulfillment characters. Little bits
of ourselves are gonna find their way into everything we write but there's a
difference between a character that shares a couple traits with you and a
character that's a self plug or wish-fulfillment character. 736 in
Aletheia has red hair I dye my hair red because I love it
so that's kind of a wish fulfillment thing. She wears mismatched socks (her
reasoning is completely different than mine
I wear it because I think it's fun also you can never lose a left pair of a sock
if you don't have pairs you just grab whatever socks you have) but that is
another similarity that found its way into her and she loves abandoned
broken-down places, she loves the ruins, and she's also very curious. So little
bits of me shine through in her but she's also vastly different and bits of
me shine through in all of my characters. I'd say that my mindset actually
probably most closely matches Rose and then we have Arson where Arson's almost
in his mindset of wish-fulfillment character because he's wild and does
what he wants in ways that I wish I could even though he takes it a bit
further than I would ever want to and Jason likes cats. But there's also a ton
of differences. Basically take your main character strip out everything from them
that's either present in yourself or you wish was present in yourself and look at
what's left. If there's very little if anything left then your main character
is a self plug or a wish fulfillment character and you need to change them up.
Always make sure to give your main character and all of your characters
really some qualities and details that you don't have and you don't ever want
to have. For example I freaking hate birds. I think birds are dumb. I'm not a big fan
of fish either but birds and fish are pretty much on the same level of dumb
for me. I like mammals, screw everything else. but 736
loves birds because it makes sense for her character to like birds. So just give
them components that are very clearly not you. Especially if you're the type
of writer who has a social media presence. The more your audience knows
you the more it's gonna be obvious if your characters is a self plug. And that
was it for the list! If any of these things stung because they're things that
you've been doing then go feel better by watching my other two videos on the
mistakes that I personally made but even if you're doing every single one of
these remember the word in "common" is in the title for a reason. These are
mistakes that tons of writers make and it doesn't make you a bad writer. No one
came straight from the uterus knowing how to write good books. And I
know you can improve because by watching to the end of this video you've just
proven that you have the willingness to learn and that's the most important step
towards improvement and even if you've already put a story out into the world
with these mistakes that's okay because there's always the next story and you
can make yourself better as you progress. Now comment down below what was your
biggest newbie mistake? Was it something on this list was it something else? If this
video hits 100 likes I'll go ahead and just throw up a part two to this so if
you want to see more make sure to like and share. Make sure to subscribe and hit
that bell. Show us some love. And thank you guys so much for watching! As always
I will see you in the next video.