Writers who try to be funny usually aren’t. I’ve seen this pattern hundreds of times in student manuscripts. A character makes a wry observation. Another character responds: “Very funny, Ellen.” The first character smirks. The reader does not smile. The problem is the author signaling that a joke just happened. Real comedy doesn’t wink at…
Most YA novels written by adults fail the same way: the teen characters sound like adults trying to remember what being 15 felt like. The problem goes deeper than vocabulary. It’s what the character cares about. Adults frame problems in context—this relationship matters because of my history, this career matters because of my future. Teenagers…
Most romance novels get the obstacle wrong. The external conflict—he’s her boss, she’s leaving town next month, there’s a misunderstanding—is decoration. Readers don’t stay for the obstacle. They stay for the wound. Every compelling romance protagonist carries something that makes love feel dangerous before the story starts. The wound is specific: she watched her mother…
Most writers have a default sentence length. They write it through everything—action, reflection, grief, joy. They never vary it. And their prose reads flat as a result. Sentence length is one of the most direct levers you have over a reader’s emotional state. Long sentences slow everything down. They create room for thought, for memory,…
Most first revisions fail before they start. Writers open the draft, fix sentences—and miss the only questions that matter. You can’t see structure from inside the sentences. After weeks of drafting, you’re too close. You’ll polish a paragraph that should be cut. You’ll fix dialogue in a scene that doesn’t need to exist. The questions…
“As you know, Bob, our family was killed in the fire 12 years ago” is the most mocked line in fiction writing—because we all know characters don’t talk that way. But I see the same mistake in every form. The info dump paragraph. The flashback that explains everything before the story needs it. The chapter…
Every confrontation in your manuscript was initiated by someone. If that someone is almost never your protagonist, you have a passive protagonist—and passive protagonists bore readers even in high-stakes plots. Take any 3 scenes. Ask: whose idea was this conflict? If the antagonist keeps knocking on doors and the protagonist keeps answering, the reader will…
Most book descriptions read like plot summaries. That’s why they don’t sell. A summary tells the reader what happens. A blurb makes them desperate to find out. Those are different jobs, and confusing them is where launches fall apart. The structure that works has three parts. Establish your character and their ordinary world in one…
The protagonist is running for her life. The world is collapsing. The villain has won. And the reader shrugs. Danger and emotional stakes aren’t the same thing. Plot jeopardy comes free with genre—any thriller has danger, obstacles, conflict. What your reader needs before any of that matters is emotional stakes: what is the protagonist’s deepest…
Most writers treat short stories like compressed novels. The form has a single job: show one moment of irreversible change. A novel carries multiple characters, intersecting problems, a web of subplots. A short story can’t. The only territory is one crack in a life, and what fell through. The student stories that don’t work share…
First-person present tense is the most seductive mistake in contemporary fiction. Writers discover it in published YA or literary novels and try it themselves. The logic seems sound: “I run down the hallway” feels more immediate than “I ran down the hallway.” More urgent. More cinematic. What gets lost is narrative distance. Distance is a…
Every dialogue tag does one job: identify the speaker. An action beat does everything else. “I’m fine,” she said. Reader hears the words.She poured the coffee without looking at him. “I’m fine.” Reader sees the lie. The action creates a second layer on top of the words. What a character does while talking reveals what…
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