any one of these 12 elements can sabotage your novel but don't feel bad they're actually pretty common mistakes that a lot of writers make and plus as we're going through these I'll give you advice on how to fix them so it's not all doom and gloom one Chuck off's Armory you've probably heard of Chuck off's gun right which is where a gun on the mantle Place must be shot by the end scene basically it's talking about how when you show things in a book or in a movie you have to have them come back into
the plot because the readers expect that check off's Armory is when you show a whole bunch of guns on The Mantel Place use show a whole bunch of stuff that's going to set the reader up for later on in the book and then you don't do anything about it the narrative ends up being disappointed because the reader hoped you were going to do something with all these great material and yet you leave all the guns unfired a Primo example of this is the television show Lost I honestly think the early seasons of the show are
some of the best storytelling that we have ever seen on the screen we have all these Mysteries going of how did they not die in the plane crash what are the others who is the smoke monster why is this island so mysterious why do they have to press that button in the bunker every 108 minutes so people are on the edges of their seats waiting for the show to fulfill all those early promises I mean I even remember going to a lost party at one of my friends house that's what a big cultural phenomenon it
was the trouble though is that all of these fantastic story lines they didn't get resolved in a very satisfying way I mean you could tell the writers were like trying to do something to resolve each of these story lines but the truth is they had started too many and then when it came to the end they just didn't have the narrative resolve to be able to wrap things up so I'd say the end of that series was one of the worst endings that I've ever seen and you should never do that to your readers two
the everything but the kitchen sink syndrome this is when you have so many great ideas for your book and you try to cram them all in look I know you have a great imagination that's why you became a writer right the trouble is you also need a disciplined imagination to know what fits inside the novel and what you're going to have to leave for the next novel instead of having five themes perhaps you need two or one instead of having 15 characters perhaps you need more like seven with only three or four of them being
really major characters instead of having four subplots maybe you only need one or two subplots now later on in this video I'm going to give plenty of examples from books but for now let's look at a movie Jupiter Ascending Jupiter Ascending got 28% on Rotten Tomatoes I mean you've got to work to get as low as 28% and I think it's Main problem was that it tried to cram so many different things into the movie you have Space Opera you have romance you have political Intrigue and in the end the viewer just feels very bewildered
now it's not as though any one of those things was bad right they were actually all great story elements but the trouble is when you try to put them all together and make them all work in a single narrative The Narrative collapses under its own weight now if you've written a novel that seems kind of kitchen sinky I will say that's perfectly okay right a lot of rough drafts end up being kitchen sinky and it takes a good revision process where you Whittle away the things that don't belong where you simplify that's what gets your
book to the publishable level number three World building vertigo this is where you create such an intricate fictional World of Magic and social cultures and World building and languages that the reader tends to get lost I mean this is always the trouble in World building right you have to give all of this information so that the reader feels like they're stepping into this cool new universe but at the same time you can't overwhelm them or else they're going to be like where's the actual story line so a couple of examples on this some of you
might have read Neil Stevenson's snow crash and to be honest overall I think it's a fantastic book right it's a seminal book it's a imination is just off the hook but there is one part of that novel where he just starts going on and on and on and on about Sumerian languages and when I got to that part of the book I'm like hm I think this needed a little heavy-handed editor just trim a bit of this back I think he got so caught up in the world building that he forgot to keep the pacing
rapid there's a section of Moby Dick where Melville just drones on a bit long about the size of whale brains and phenology which is where you can like interpret personality based on the shape of a skull div in a little too deep Melville haha pun intended no but seriously I think he fell in love a little bit too much with the research and forgot about the storyline that said I actually love Mobby dick or another example Dune I think everyone would agree that the first book of Dune is just an absolute Masterpiece is perfect but
I think as you get later on to the series book three book four book five it gets bogged down in an enormous amount of like political and religious backstory the political and religious systems are so complex that I've had a lot of people tell me like oh I hated the rest of the series just read the first book your goal with World building is to give the reader enough information that they can follow and track with the adventures of your protagonist and also enough that they feel like they are immersed in a world that feels
completely foreign than their own but on the other hand not so much that you get caught up in these minor issues of World building that don't really satisfy your reader four inspiration in digestion these are books that are wearing their influence so much on their sleeve that you feel like they're kind of ripping off the other book what I see most frequently as editor are Harry Potter look aytes and I've read a good number of these novels both published and unpublished and they're always leaning a little bit too heavily on the sort of hair part
or framework of the school and magic and an orphan who's suddenly special it's just a little bit too close for readers to feel like oh this author has done something fresh and new I mean it's good to be inspired right you actually want to be inspired by an enormous range of books and you should read really widely so you can get all that inspiration I think the trouble comes when you don't properly digest it you read one book and suddenly that book inspires your book so much that it seems like a copycat another example of
this is probably the most most derivative book I've ever read in the literary world it was called red sky in morning by Paul Lynch and when I read it I thought this is a Cormac McCarthy ripoff specifically a Blood Meridian ripoff it's based on a historical event all the characters are male the language that he uses was identical to Cormac McCarthy's the villain was identical to the judge in blood Muran down to the very speeches he gave and the stories both end in a tragic way down to the main character and what's sad is that
if I hadn't read Blood Meridian this actually would have been a great book I really enoy it but the trouble is because I had read Blood Meridian this felt like a ripoff and I'm like bro you're really talented but you have to write your own book five the aesthetic over ethics trap this is when you craft reprehensible characters or situations purely for shock value rather than having it contribute to the story as a whole and I understand why it's easy to do this writing shocking things gets a reaction from your readers it works the trouble
comes when you're not really trying to say something through that violence or sex uality if there's not a point to it because then it just starts to seem gratuitous you're just putting it in there to manipulate the reader rather than it's serving the interest of the story I have a movie and a book example for this one and let's start with the movie Saw and I'm talking about you know the whole film franchise of saw all the sequels and everything I think it's a series which focuses so much on the elaborate torture scenes as a
way of like getting a reaction from the viewer rather than saying something meaningful about life or violence or existence or something and I'm not saying that people don't enjoy that I'm telling you that if you're crafting that kind of story you need to have some sort of reason or justification or lesson or Insight or something from the character that gives it a little bit more depth the second example which I think does a much better job of This Is A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Buress now I'm not talking about the American version which is 20
chapter song and I'm not talking about the movie version I'm talking about the 21 chapter British version so this is a book which contains tons of Ultraviolence I mean horrific things happening to very innocent people but I think of the very in just really rescues it because he has Alex get captured so there's some sort of punishment for his violence and in the end he grows up and he turns away from that life of ultra violence he carries a picture of a child symbolizing that he wants to get married and have like a respectable life
in the end there's a very strong message that there is a possibility of people who have chosen Ultraviolence to turn away from that violence and be integrated into society now I'm not saying the ending of your book has to be a happy ending or show the character changing in an unbelievable way but I'm saying you should have some sort of point if you're going to show crazy amounts of violence six dialogue ventriloquism this is where every single character in a book basically sounds like the same person so it's the author being a ventriloquist and throwing
their voice onto every single character ideally you want the author to be able to Channel original voices for every single character right and I think a good example of this would be Aaron Sorkin the West swing everyone has these rat attack clever on liners and if you really listen to everyone's dialogue it all sounds like Aaron sorin this is the guy who wrote The Social Network as well and I think you can see those dialogue tendencies in that film as well I'd say the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer is another example of this where if
you just take out all the dialogue and put it all in a separate sheet it all kind of sounds alike but I feel like of all the mistakes on this page this honestly might be one of the easiest ones to solve I mean why not just give one character a lisp or make one have a regional accent give one person a draw make one character curse a lot give one character a catchphrase make one character speak very formally like the butler in the remains of the day by kazuo ishi Guru look if this is something
that you struggle with I'd actually recommend that you take my dialogue course in the book Fox Academy I give a lot of exercises and lessons in how to make sure your character sounds only like your character in other words they sound differently than all the other characters check that out I'll put a link in the description that you can follow seven metaphor overdose okay I should say right off the bat that I don't hate metaphors and simile right I think they're beautiful wonderful things and you should definitely include them in your writing on book Fox
I actually have a list of the hund best metaphors ever written and you should give that a read it honestly is very inspiring uh for your own writing but I will say that I've read some published books and also some unpublished books where the author's gotten a little too metaphor SL simile crazy there are so many flowery comparisons I start to lose sight of the story and the characters and I just think oh wow this is quite elaborate once I read this short story in a literary magazine I cannot remember the name of the author
of the short story but there were probably 400 metaphors and simile in uh you know 4,000 words I mean it was every single sentence and so this was the author shtick you know this is what he did it was a style I looked up some of his other stories and he always did this but you know what I got from that story I got from the story is this author thinks he's smart and he wants me as a reader to think he's smart too I don't think that should be the takeaway of your story or
your book really what you want to Channel all the attention to is your storyline is the character struggles is to the emotion that you want your reader to feel so look cut down those metaphors and simile go through your book and only use the ones that are absolutely necessary that really compare two unlike things and that actually contribute to the reader's understanding of the story number eight lack of character motivation why is the most important question you can ask up a character why are they doing this and not that why are they taking any action
in your story it's fine if you're character doesn't know their motivations right as long as the reader can either guess at what their motivations might be or if you're keeping it a secret and later on you're going to reveal their true motivations I think a great example of this failing is the movie called the room if you don't know about this movie it's famous for being the best worst movie of all time I mean it's atrocious but it's hilarious because it's just so bad it was made into a movie called The Disaster Artist with Dave
Franco but I encourage you to go back and watch the original it is wild anyway anyway there is a scene where they're throwing a football around inside like 5T away from each other and randomly a character named Mark pushes a character named Mike why I don't know there is so much in that movie where you're looking for motivation and you're like I do not know why that character just did that and by watching it you realize how essential and important character motivations are I also think it's really interesting when motivations are particularly Petty or funny
there was an episode of Supernatural where an Angel went back in time and stopped the Titanic from sinking now what was the motivation of that oh you're thinking this Angel wanted to like save lives and prevent a tragedy no it was because this Angel really really hated My Heart Will Go On by Seline Dion and so they wanted this song Never to exist and so they saved the Titanic from sinking that is some kind of motivation right there but it still worked right I mean it's a crazy motivation but it's still a motivation nine temporally
shortsighted this is a story that's so fixated on his present moment that the character don't seem to have a life before the storyline or any sort of future after the storyline if we know nothing about your character's past that is not going to feel like a real person it's going to feel like a cipher a madeup character now it is fine that if it's a mystery you're keeping it for later on in the book as long as at some point the reader gets a sense this person lived a life before this point and I'll also
say you don't have to explicitly go into backstory and reveal huge swast of this person's life if you just give a sense that oh this person had a life before if if you just allude to it it doesn't have to be heavy-handed or take up a lot of space in the book a good exercise is to sketch out a timeline of your character's life just so you know what has happened over the course of their life so you don't make silly errors like like getting a former job wrong or something like that in small things
like these by Clare Keegan she actually does a great job of focusing on the present moment story with the father but also talking about his struggles with an absent father and worrying about the future for his daughters you can also do the opposite of this mistake where you focus so much on back story that it overwhelms and overshadows the present moment story so you have to ask yourself what mistake you're making are you focusing so much on the present that you're forgetting the past are you focusing so much on the past that you don't have
enough dramatic moments in the present number 10 is the gotcha spiral this is a story that relies so much upon plot twist that it starts to feel a little bit contrived and the reader starts to feel a little manipulated it's an Impulse toward have constant surprises but if those surprises aren't earned then it's going to feel false I'm not going to mention the books that I'm thinking of because hey who knows maybe you read these books and you enjoyed these books but I will talk about some of the common problems that you get when you
rely too heavily on surprises one sometimes the reader feels manipulated they know what you're doing they can see what you're doing and it's a surprise not because it's intrinsic to the story but because they know that you're trying to get a rise out of them ideally you want the author to be behind the curtain so that the reader doesn't think oh the author's trying to do this to me now and if the reader can sense the author hid behind the curtain and pulling all the levers then the surprise isn't quite as fulfilling a second reason
a lot of surprises can fail is that the reader sees them coming this is part of the problem with M Night Shyamalan movies is he made so many movies that have this huge twist in them after the sixth sense obviously that viewers started to expect those twists and they started to like see them coming more easily because they know like oh this is the guy that does lots of twists in the end I think that made his movies a little bit too predictable the third reason that Tumi surprises my not is that you didn't earn
all of the Surprises by earn I mean there needs to be little Clues beforehand where a reader can look back and see okay it all makes sense as opposed to having zero Clues and then just upending their expectations for the story they're going to feel a little abused and a little taken advantage of so in general it's better to just have one or two twists rather than like a whole series of twists in a row but make sure that the twists that you have that you really earn them by laying Clues throughout the whole story
fourth reason why a bunch of surprises might not work is that I do think it reduces the ability to reread with pleasure if the majority of the pleasure that you give in your book is simply the reversal where the reader is surprised then they're not going to be able to reread that and feel the same pleasure as they did the first time number 11 checklist character development this is when characters feel like they've been built by just going down a checklist sort of characters 101 what should my character have oh they need to have a
certain color hair a certain color eye we need to know what clothes they're wearing they need to have a hobby and they need to have one other thing characters built in this way they feel like they've been built by an algorithm or by AI rather than having the sort of contradictory Vitality of being an actual human being here's some examples of a checklist character orphan but truly special and talented inside a romance if you have a man who is in finance trust fund 65 blue eyes come on that's a checklist character to avoid a checklist
character work on giving your character surprising character traits sometimes these are contradictory traits like a rich man who doesn't spend any money sometimes these are character traits which are out of character for them for instance imagine a really cool hip smooth woman who plays the accordion I always loved this character building in parks and W where it was revealed one season that Ron Swanson snuck out to a jazz club where he plays jazz saxophone under the name Duke silver somehow that reveal was both deeply surprising and also true to his character and and the 12th
and final mistake is subtext is everything syndrome this is when you make your story so subtle and Elusive that it's kind of impenetrable to the reader basically you're mistaking being obscure for being profound now don't get me wrong subtext is great right subtext is an essential technique to make your story better so that the story doesn't just exist on the surface but there's layers that you can peel back to better understand that story and if this is something you really want to get better at I would recommend that you read the art of subtext by
Charles Baxter it is thick it is dense but it's also just packed with great nuggets that will help you introduce more subtext into your writing but the purpose of this point is to talk about writers who end up going too far with subtext and I see this quite often in my work as an editor where a writer has alluded to something or hinted at something and I as a reader am thinking I don't get what you're going for I don't understand where you wanted me to to go with this story or what you wanted me
to think and so I have to gently tell them okay I think you were trying to make me feel this but I think you need to make it a little more explicit make it a little less subtext ultimately the danger with too much subtext is that the reader going to feel confused so there's this fine line you have to walk where you don't want to be so blatant and explicitly say say your themes are the subtext obviously but at the same point if you're too elusive then no one's going to get it I do think
that commercial writers need to work on putting more subtext into fiction while literary writers need to make sure that the subtext that they have is still understandable
