This is the second in a (very) occasional series of common writing mistakes made by unpublished writers. (Note, I am not a published writer, but I do write, and I do read.)

This is one I know I am guilty of myself and I’ve read quite a few published novels that do exactly the same thing. Especially first novels. It’s the rushed ending.

It goes like this. You’re reading a novel. You love the characters, you’re caught up in the storyline, you’re really enjoying the book. Then you get around 80% through and suddenly the whole thing goes off the rails. The end whizzes up on you so fast that you’re left going, “Huh? How did they get from there to here?”, and sometimes, “I don’t get what just happened here?”

Then, instead of going back to the author and being able to say, “This was a great story, I’d read anything you wrote,” you have to spend two days trying to work out what went wrong, and how.

We’ve analysed our own writing and for us it comes down to two things:

• We just want to finish the book. We’re so close, and we’ve been working on it for so long and we can see that we’re nearly there so we just go and go and go. And when we’re done we’re finished. We don’t go back and edit because we’re drained. And we’re finished. There’s no more to do. We don’t want to touch it until the next draft. Besides, we have other ideas percolating and we want to do them now.
• As we write we re-write. When you starting writing for the day you re-read what you wrote the day before (usually) and fix any problems. We also regularly go back over the whole story, re-reading, fixing things. Thus the first part of the book gets a lot more rewrites than the second.

  (Logically this means that the first part of the book should be better than the anything else, but usually it isn’t. My theory as to why not is because it takes time to get onto a roll. When’re you’re around 20-30,000 words into the book you’re into the story and into the habit of writing, so the writing from there on flows much better.)

There’s an easy way to fix this. Drafts. Drafts 2 and 3 (for us) are where we attempt to fix up that hurried ending, where we expand it and explain what we knew in our minds but forgot to tell the reader first time round because we were in such a hurry. But it takes time and distance for us to even admit that the ending doesn’t work. If we wrote our next drafts immediately after we wrote the first one I’m not sure we would see that as clearly.

The first in an occasional series on common writing mistakes by unpublished writers.

I’m no ‘expert’, but I do write, and I am a reader. (I am also unpublished.)

I know that we, as writers, say there is a lot of garbage out there in published book land, but that writing has been polished to some degree and many of the story flaws removed. And yes, I am sure you can pick out five published books right now and show me truly bad writing, but I’m talking in general here. In general, published books aren’t bad.

There are some brilliant unpublished books out there too. I can point to three novels that I know personally that are better than many published books (and no, I don’t mean ours), and another dozen that are nearly there. But in general (again), you do find more writing problems in unpublished novels.

I read a lot of unpublished novels, and the same mistakes come up again and again.

Of of these is the ‘omniscient narrator that segues into a protagonist point-of-view’ start.

It starts of something like this:

The man stood at the top of the hill. Below him the port town sparkled with the last rays of the setting sun—the fabled Port of Kings, gateway to the world of the others. Of course, the man didn’t believe it.

Jed sighed, fixed the pack tighter on his back and started the steep descent. If he was lucky he would reach the port before the gates closed.

Okay, it’s bad, but you get the gist. Jed was the man at the top of the hill. The rest of the chapter is solely from his point-of-view, and probably the whole book too.

It’s particularly common in prologues, although I notice some writers start each chapter with it.

Some writers switch between omniscient narrator and third- (or first, or second) person point-of-view and it works. So why is this so bad?

The problem here is that the omniscient point-of-view is very short, usually one or two paragraphs at most, and the point-of-view switch is totally unexpected.

It also makes for a weaker start to the story.

You don’t have long to hook the reader. The sooner you can get them into your protagonist’s head the more likely they are to stay with the story.

And it doesn’t even take much to change.

Jed crested the hill and stopped. The fabled Port of Kings below spread out below him. It sparkled in the last rays of the setting sun.

Gateway to the worlds of the Others, or so they said. Jed didn’t believe it. He sighed, and fixed the pack tighter on his back and started the steep descent. If he was lucky he would reach the port before the gates closed.

It has another advantage too.  Even as a writer I almost added extra detail about how he felt (gateway, pah—he was here to buy a rare coin; the descent—he was tired and cold and hungry), because I, too, was already more inside Jed’s head.