Everyone makes mistakes.
Writers, however, live by the mistake. Mistakes are our craft, that's why we talk in terms of drafts and edits and drafts and rewrites and drafts. (There's a word for a perfectionist writer: blocked.) Without mistakes, we've got nothing.
I often think all the writing advice in the world boils down to:
1) Be interesting.
Every tip and technique--'show, don't tell' and 'tell if you want' and 'embrace white space' and 'leave out the parts that readers skip' and 'one POV per section' and 'kill your adverbial darlings'--is just a way to achieve #1.
But that's a 'turtles, all the way down' problem. Because I'm not sure that 'show, don't tell' is any easier than 'be interesting.' How do you show, not tell? How do you leave out the parts that readers skip?
You make mistakes. Because you can't write without them.
The problem is the next step: learning to identify your mistakes. Transforming yourself from a hopeful Hyde focused on getting sentences on the page, to a venal Jekyll who despises every word. I think that's the key to being a writer; learning to read your own stuff with aggressive disdain.
I've been discovering new frontiers in my own mistakenhood recently. Some of them are little things: I overuse 'though.' Some are bigger: plotting more complexity than the genre allows.
So. What mistakes do you tend to make? How did you realize you were making those mistakes? Are there any mistakes that you recently realized you were making?
And here's an exercise, should you choose to accept it. Find the mistakes, if any, and fix them:
Frank and his wife continued to live in the same house, and to meet every day, yet they remained entire strangers to each other. Frank made a point to be seen with his wife every day so that the neighbors might not have the right to gossip, but he avoided dining at home. Leon was never seen there; Suzy met him outside, and her husband knew it.
All three suffered from a situation which would have been intolerable for a single day had not each believed it to be transitory. Frank expected to see this passion, like everything else in the world, come to an end and thus his name would not be dishonored. Suzy, the cause of all the trouble, and the one on whom the consequences weighed the most cruelly, accepted her position simply and solely because she expected--nay, was firmly convinced--that the matter would soon be explained and settled. She had not the least idea how it would come about, but she was certain that it would now come about very speedily.
Leon in spite of himself, submitting to her views, was also awaiting something to happen independent of himself, which should resolve all their difficulty.
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