5 Mistakes New Writers Make & How To Avoid Them
By: Jessica A
Tags: Writing Advice, Short Story, New Writers, Writing, Writing Tips

1. Thinking your first draft has to be perfect

Sometimes (okay, once) inspiration strikes and I write a beautiful first draft; more often, it’s a hot mess.

It’s no coincidence that it’s during this stage many writers give up. But I’ll let you in on a secret: your first draft is supposed to be horrible. That’s why 2nd drafts, 3rd drafts and quality-control measures like proofreading exist. Best-selling author Jodi Picoult put it best when she said, “You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

My advice? Explore techniques that help you shelve your overthinking and just write. I’ve trialled several methods and explored what personality-type each might work for in this article.

2. Thinking your first draft is actually perfect

Long before I became an editor, I wrote poetry. It was abysmal, but I was a new writer and secretly harboured the belief I was an undiscovered genius. (Spoiler: I wasn’t.) I’d write a poem in one go, send it off and then be deeply offended no one thought much of it.

I was inexperienced of course, but my editing job quickly made it clear that wasn’t the point. A first draft even by a seasoned writer can be good, even very good, but I’ve not seen a perfect one in over 10 years of editing.

Don’t worry that an editor will strip the personality from your work because that’s untrue (unless you’re unfortunate enough to have hired a terrible editor). As Rogena Mitchell-Jones puts it, “​​We edit your words, your writing, your sentences and paragraphs… but never your voice.”

If can’t afford an editor, find willing readers or at the very least make several drafts of your work. As writer Michael Lee once said, “The first draft reveals the art; revision reveals the artist.”

3. Getting tripped up by writing advice

Writing advice can be transformative, but some of it is misleading and nearly all of it requires reflection. I’ve written a whole article on common writing tips to be wary of, but for now, let’s look at 2 examples.

Begin your stories with action

This isn’t wrong, but it’s not quite right either.

Readers are compelled by a combination of the external events of your plot and the internal struggles of your characters. So by all means, begin with action but also understand it won’t have much impact before you’ve explained what this event means to your characters specifically, and how it relates to their personality and state of mind.

Write every day

Creative writing isn’t the same as brushing your teeth — and nor should it be. For most writers, it’s unrealistic to expect we can write every day and hold down our other responsibilities without suffering burnout. Moreover, time off allows our thoughts to percolate, which I believe makes for a stronger brew in the end.

All this to say, writing advice can be misleading, and following it blindly is sometimes worse than ignoring it completely.

4. Focusing on the wrong thing

Having goals can provide a powerful incentive to write, but there’s a hitch. When you’re a new writer, chances are you’ll pen a lot of drivel before you produce anything good. That doesn’t mean you’re not talented: for the vast majority of us writing is a craft, not just an innate ability.

And when you focus too much on a goal, not achieving it quickly enough is dispiriting; I’ve seen to many promising writers give up because their first novel didn’t get published, when what they really needed to do was keeping writing to hone their craft.

Focus instead on maintaining a process.

When we focus on developing writing systems, we often achieve goals as a byproduct. Certainly, that’s what happened when I joined this platform. I focussed on publishing a few times a week regardless of how well my work did; before I knew it, I’d reached my first 1k followers and was earning a little money—the goals I’d chosen to shelve in favour of doing consistent work.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems,” or so swears habit-expert James Clear.

5. Forcing a process

I was intrigued when a few weeks ago a writer friend exclaimed, waving her coffee cup wildly, she’d found the only way to write short stories. You had to work one line at a time, she enthused, contemplating what needed to happen to progress the story after each sentence.

There was just one flaw: I couldn’t do it, and lord knows I tried.

The story that resulted was oddly robotic. But as soon as I used a different technique—creating an overview of plot points alongside a character arc—I wrote a short story with more heart (if you’re curious, it’s here). The point being, what elevates one person’s writing will stifle another’s.

Experiment, and adopt whatever helps you get the job done.