As a book coach and beta reader, I’ve noticed flaws that many manuscripts suffer from, regardless of their genre. You can find some of them in this blog post, along with a few resources to address them.
1) A flat character arc
Characters are the portal that lets the reader into a story and allows them to experience it as if it happened to them. They need to feel like real people with their own desires and goals. So often, writers pay much more attention to the plot than to their characters. As a result, their protagonists change very little throughout the course of the story. They go through difficult, often harrowing events, but don’t grow or learn from them. This change, however, is precisely what the reader is looking for in fiction, because it gives them a chance to experience transformation. To read more on the topic, check Lisa Cron’s ‘Wired for Story’.
In case you’re wondering what’s more important for the story, the characters or the plot, my blog post, ‘Plot or Character’, dives deeper into this topic.
2) The emotion is not on the page
Reading is a collaborative immersive experience, a cooperation between the author and the reader. The author suggests and does their best to show, so the reader can imagine and feel. For the reader to be able to do this, they need to access the emotional layer of the story. The only way the writer can do that is to show it. That’s right, I’m talking about ‘Show, don’t tell’. It’s not enough to state that your character feels a certain way, you need to show them behaving as if they feel that way.
‘Show, don’t tell’ is a topic in its own right, which deserves a separate blog post, but let me just say that showing emotions covers many layers of ‘action’ in your manuscript. For example:
- showing the character’s bodily reactions
- writing realistic dialogue
- using silences strategically
- showing characters’ reactions to what’s happening.
3) Info dumps
You got the story down and it’s flowing, but there are bits of information the reader needs to get to understand the context or the backstory. For example, you want to convey that your protagonist’s uncle has suffered because of some past event, or that he had a hard life because their family has been experiencing tragedy since forever. Perhaps you’ve done a lot of good work on researching their backstories or intriguing theories that you want to share with the reader.
So you lay it on thick in a paragraph or two, where you explain the whole history of misfortune, along with a few lessons learned, or worse, you pack it tightly into chunks of dialogue. That’s called an info dump and it will make the reader pause. This is bad, because the reader won’t be able to process or retain all the information and the attempt to do so will take them out of the story.
There’s a lot more to stay about info dumps, which is why I wrote about how to identify and avoid info dumps.
4) Weak cause-and-effect trajectory
While in life things don’t need to make sense, and they often don’t, that’s not the case in fiction. Each event needs to have a purpose and consequences which affect the rest of the story. In manuscripts, I often see things just happening because they need to happen. Something happens and then, something else happens. There’s either no logic to why things happen or the logic isn’t made clear enough.
That reveals the author’s hand behind the curtain and makes the reader feel that things are coming out of nowhere. It’s akin to observing figurines being moved across the chess board rather than playing the game of chess yourself.
You don’t want that, so you’ll want to make sure that your story has a strong cause-and-effect trajectory. Each event must logically lead to or cause the following event. For example, something happens in scene 1 and because of that, certain other things happen in scene 2, and so on. If you can’t connect your scenes with because of that, your story might not make sense. To learn more about cause-and-effect trajectory, check out this excellent post on Story Grid.
5) Unrealistic dialogue
Dialogue is an element that has a huge impact on your story, so it’s worth paying extra attention to it. When done well, it’ll make an average story sing. When done badly, it’ll water down even the greatest stories. For example, your dialogue should sound different from your exposition and shouldn’t read like a series of monologues in which characters exchange information you want your reader to have. You’ll also need to give your characters a chance and the space to react to what’s being said, so that the reader can understand why these things matter to your story.
I wrote more about dialogue in storytelling and how to avoid making these 5 common mistakes.
