Hello and welcome back to my blog.

Today I will talk about the Top 5 Mistakes when it comes to novel writing.

1. The first one is having a boring story. This can be due to long winded or cliched descriptions. One thing I’ve talked about in the past is that it’s not enough to say a female character is beautiful. Write something that is more specific than that. Such as she didn’t need makeup or fancy clothes to turn a man’s head when she walked into the room.

An example of long winded description is, her long dark hair blew gracefully in the wind as she walked like a          cat on the prowl, her hips swaying with every step.

It’s the same thing with showing vs. telling. The example being he was happy to see her after being away for          two weeks. Change that to he bent over wrapping his arms around her waist and stood up straight lifting her          off the floor and swung her around. There are times though when telling is necessary such as if you want to            have characters travel for a couple hours from one destination to the next, unless it’s important to the story              you don’t need to describe every pot hole in the pavement that they drove over.

2. Characters that sound the same. To avoid this give the main characters in the story a verbal expression,                 physical tick or some other type of quirk that makes them stand out. One character could be a highly                       educated English professor with a PHD. It would make sense for that person to talk with longer than                       necessary words. Likewise an uneducated character is more likely to use words like “ain’t” or use profanity.

3. Being repetitive. Having a character bite or purse their lips all the time, or writing it out the same way every            time will get redundant. And it’s another way to make the story boring.

4.   Over use of profanity. While it may be true that a book with criminals would use a lot of swear words in it,                 there are people who won’t read a book again by the same author if there’s an over use of swearing. Law               And Order was on TV for almost twenty years and there was hardly any cursing. The Sopranos had cursing          through the entire series and it lasted on TV less than half the time that Law And Order did. So it is a                      personal choice to use foul language in writing, know that you’ll be limiting your market.

5. Not getting feedback on your writing. Feedback can come from friends, beta readers and editors. Your friends         will tell you what you want to hear – they have to like the book, they are your friends after all. But to get an               honest feedback you need beta readers and editors to tell you where there are holes in your story and where         you’ve made any of the four mistakes listed above. For my own example, I let a friend read the first draft of            my first novel, No Remorse No Regret, and he said he couldn’t find any holes in it, that he thought it would be        ready for publication then. Really? There’s no way any book can be ready to be published after only one draft.        This is why it’s imperative to get feedback from people who will tell you what you need to hear.

That’s it for today, make it a great one.