Top the most common mistakes found by a Reader for a Angry Robot.
Over on Donna Hanson’s blog, she lists these mistakes. Having done a lot of manuscript appraisal over the years I can tell you she is spot on. The list is long, because people do make a lot of different mistakes. Some you can work around, some you can fix easily. But sometimes the mistakesare instrinsic to the writing and then it is just a matter of putting the book aside and starting again.
Her list is really comprehensive, but there’s two things I would add:
Point of View. Don’t skip from head to head within a scene. I once read a 7 page scene with 11 POV changes. POV is powerful, use the changes sparingly. Signal when you do change the view point. Do it for a reason, to reveal something the other character wouldn’t know and only do it once within a scene. I’ve switched to staying in one character’s head for the whole of a scene, simply for clarity.
World Building Flaws. This is my personal bug bear. Every time I come across a flaw in world building it throws me out of the story. Women rule the country. OK. Why? Power rests with the powerful. Why do women rule? Do your research and build the world consistently.
Many thanks to Donna for her post on common flaws in manuscripts. Now, I’ll go back and take another look at my current work-in-progress.
Never hurts to review and a writer never stops learning.
NOTE: Donna has since added a post on world building and pointof view. See it here. Go Donna!
Hi Rowena
Thanks for linking to my post. The two things you mentioned are spot on too. They were bug bears for me and I was planning to say more in a later post. That one on common issues became so long I cut it back. So I will make sure I cover off on them.
Regards
Donna
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In fact, I prefer a single point-of-view character for any story or novel. I really dislike shifting from character to character. It disrupts my immersion in the story.
Having said that, there are exceptions. The multiple pov characters in Lord of the Rings never ever bothered me… whatever else you may say of Tolkien’s works, he handles shifting pov as well as anyone I’ve ever read. So perhaps its fairer to say that it isn’t that I dislike pov shifts, but that few authors do it well. For example, when I read Ian Irvine’s early books, there were bucketloads of pov shifts, and it wasn’t always very obvious when he did it. I ended up launching several of his books across the room in frustration. I had to concentrate so hard on following the pov and chronology shifts that I couldn’t settle into a state of immersion in the story.
I’ve read some posts which claim that this preference for minimal pov shifts is a modern fad only, and that authors should feel free to shift povs as much as they want, so long as they do it in a way which the reader can follow. I think it’s a tricky issue. I think, like so many things, it’s advisable for inexperienced authors to avoid frequent pov shifts… but that an experienced author might attempt it.
Nigel, some very big name authors shift POV within scene like crazy. They dip into random heads and never come back to them.
I limit each scene to one POV. And I try to tell that scene from the POV of the person who has the most to lose.