Lakin C.S. 5 Editors Tackle the 12 Fatal Flaws of Fiction Writing

London: Ubiquitous Press, 2015. — 334 p.Fiction writers often struggle to improve their craft
And the biggest challenge comes from the inability to see what isn’t working. The prose feels off. The scene isn’t gelling. The dialogue sounds stilted or clunky. But they don’t know why or how to fix it.Here are some of the 12 fatal flaws:— Overwriting—the most egregious and common flaw in fiction writing.
— Nothin’ Happenin’—Too many stories take too long to get going. Learn what it means to start in medias res.
— Weak Construction—It sneaks in at the level of words and sentences, and rears up in up in the form of — passive voice, ing verbs, and misplaced modifiers.
— Too Much Backstory—the bane of many manuscripts. Backstory has its place, but too often it serves as an info dump and bogs down pacing.
— POV Violations—Head hopping, characters knowing things they can’t know, and foreshadowing are just some of the many POV violations explored.
— Telling instead of Showing—Writers have heard this admonition, but there’s a lot to understanding how and when to show instead of tell.
— Lack of Pacing and Tension—Many factors affect pacing and tension: clunky passages, mundane dialogue, unimportant information, and so much more.
— Flawed Dialogue Construction—Writers need to learn to balance speech and narrative tags and avoid “on the nose” speech.
— “Underwriting”—just as fatal as overwriting. Too often scenes are lacking the necessary actions, descriptions, and details needed to bring them to life.
— Description Deficiencies and Excesses—Learning how to balance description is challenging, and writers need to choose wisely just what to describe and in what way.