As writers, we can have what I call pet words and phrases. These are words or phrases we tend to use more than we probably should. One of my big ones is the word “just.” That guy can creep into my writing so easily that I will often find it three or four times in a single short story. And like most adverbs, it is usually better omitted completely.
Here is how I tend to use it:
“He just felt it was time.”
“It was just the kind of thing she liked to do.”
“She was just over the speed limit.”
I think you can see in the first two examples how removing the word actually strengthens the sentence. There can be an argument for keeping the word in the third sentence, as it is a qualifier as to how much over the speed limit she was.
Other times you can have whole phrases that feel completely normal and natural to use but may be more specific to you than you think. I am reminded of a brother and sister I knew in college who would both use the term “Nanook of the North” to self-describe how they were bundled up in the winter. I am not sure if I have ever heard anyone else use that term, but I suspect it was rather common in their family growing up, so it came to feel ubiquitous to them.
The danger in using pet words and phrases is either coming off as repetitive or, in the case of Nanook, using a reference that may not be familiar to the reader.
While the use of AI is controversial and may go against market submission standards, it can be useful to help reveal your pet words. Here is a an example of a prompt I used with ChatGPT:
Review the following stories for “pet words” and phrases: words, expressions, sentence structures, or descriptions I use more often than I probably realize. Look for repetition both within individual stories and across the entire collection. Identify each repeated word or phrase, how often it appears, which stories it appears in, and a few representative examples. Explain whether the repetition seems distracting or acceptable, and briefly suggest ways to reduce or vary it. Rank the results from the most noticeable repetition to the least. Do not rewrite the stories.
The three items I would place on your personal editing checklist are: search for “just,” inspect clusters of “like,” and watch for repeated “looked/turned” action beats.
The surprise for me is the “looked/turned” action beats comment. I didn’t realize I default to that so much.
Let me know in the comments below what pet words you find creeping into your stories.
I often give tips or advice on the rules of writing, or maybe “best practices” is a better term. The beauty of writing is that there are no hard-and-fast rules. Below are some cases where great storytellers effectively broke from commonly accepted practices.
Show, don’t Tell
One that immediately comes to mind is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. When I read that fantastic book, I kept thinking that he was doing a lot of telling. Card, in fact, has commented on how he feels about the show-don’t-tell argument. In short, he argues that there is a place for both showing and telling and writer’s need to know when to use each, although he is later quoted in the forum as saying “Most storytelling should be just that, telling.”
Maintain a linear Storyline
Another one that comes to mind is the movie Pulp Fiction and its nonlinear story line. That movie changed the perception that an audience (or reader) needs to be fed events in a linear fashion to understand a story. It’s structure was not random. Breaking from the chronological structure gave Tarintino the freedom to:
Open and close with the same restaurant robbery, giving the film a circular shape.
End with Jules’s moral transformation instead of Vincent’s death. I feel this is the larger key aspect; he chose to have the character arc drive the sequence as opposed to showing the events chronologically.
Introduce characters before fully explaining how their stories connect.
Create suspense by withholding context rather than merely withholding outcomes.
Make each short story/video feel like parts of one larger story.
Have One Consistent Narrative Voice
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, breaks the convention of a story being told from a central narrator. A total of fifteen narrators (with wildly different personalities and mannerisms) tell the story of the Bundren family and their journey, including one character who actually narrates after her own death. It is an interesting approach because the point seems to be that the Bundren family members cannot communicate honestly with one another, so no single member can narrate the entire story.
The Narrator Is Honest
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye violates several common practices, but the one that stands out in this book is making the narrator an unreliable one. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, repeats the same words and expressions, wanders into lengthy digressions, contradicts himself. The story has very little actual plot and seems to be mostly an exercise in getting to understand this narrative character. Holden is judgmental, dishonest, and downright not likable. When I read the book, it felt like Holden was either lying to himself or brutally unaware of reality. It was clear that he failed to look at his own hand in ending up where he was or his own ability to make changes in his life he desired (something I feel still burdens a lot of people today). He calls other people “phonies” and insists that he doesn’t care about things that are obviously causing him pain. These weaknesses created one of the most recognizable voices in American fiction, particularly for that time period. Salinger did a great job of turning an unreliable narrator into a form of indirect characterization. We gradually understand Holden because we learn not to trust him.
The Importance of Grammar and Punctuation
E. E. Cummings* is an interesting example when it comes to punctuation. Here is a summary of the conventions he challenged or outright broke:
The omission or repositioning of punctuation.
Selective rather than conventional capitalization.
Words broken apart or combined in unexpected ways.
Fractured sentence structures.
White space and line placement used as part of a poem’s meaning.
Visual arrangements that allowed readers to experience movement on the page.
Keep in mind the writers and storytellers discussed above are masters in their respective crafts. They know where the lines are, what they are risking, and how to tread carefully when they choose to cross them.
For a while, I thought it would be cool to be known for having the gimmick of never naming my main characters in a story. I envisioned how cool it would be for someone later to connect the dots on this in an aha moment and understand it was an intentional thing. Instead, one of the first stories that got rejected had an additional comment along the lines of “And what was the protagonist’s name? It is never mentioned in the story!”
Not that a good writer couldn’t have ever pulled that off, but I learned that people do take notice when you cross that particular line.
How about you? What line have you crossed in your storytelling? What are some boundaries you feel need to be pushed?
There seem to be two basic approaches to character description in fiction.
Method 1: Painting the entire picture
This is the method I grew up learning in high school creative writing classes: lots of adjectives and descriptive details intended to paint a complete picture of the character for the reader.
I think authors can sometimes fall into the trap of believing this is what “good writing” is supposed to look like. The more detailed the description, the better the writing. But it can easily be overdone.
Much like fractals, or measuring a coastline, you have a nearly unlimited ability to zoom in on a character at finer and finer resolution. You can go on and on describing infinitely finer detail as to the hair, the eyes, the clothes, the wrinkles, the way someone stands and on and on.
The problem this often creates is something I call letting the words get in the way of the story.
Too many adjectives or too much descriptive prose creates a longer journey for the reader to get to the underlying plot. That doesn’t mean detailed description is bad. Sometimes the details matter. They can establish mood, tell us something important about a character or even reveal something about the plot, but the question is whether the detail is actually doing something for the story.
Here is an example:
She held the white, dew-covered lilies at her side.
vs.
She held the delicate, white, fragrant, dew-covered, freshly cut lilies at her side.
We do “see” a lot more when it comes to the lilies, but is that really important to the story or is the main point that we understand she has the lilies and they are being held at her side for some reason? Note that “dew-covered” could also be cut if there isn’t an important reason for us to know that.
I try to use no more than two adjectives in series to describe something, sometimes three at the very most if I feel I really need to have it.
Method 2: Giving the reader just enough
The second approach is what I think of as the Stephen King method: provide enough detail for the reader to get a feel for the character, but allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest.
King will often give a character some kind of hook: a memorable physical trait, habit, or mannerism that helps us quickly orient ourselves to which character we are reading about.
This is particularly useful in the kind of fiction King often writes: long novels such as It and The Stand, with large casts of characters who may disappear for many pages before showing up again. Giving a character a memorable trait helps the reader recognize them when they return.
I also think part of King’s strategy is to avoid giving us the entire character all at once.
Instead, he organically reveals more details along the way. We learn about the character as they move through the story through actions and dialogue.
In some ways, this is closer to how we actually get to know people.
When you first meet someone, you don’t receive a paragraph describing everything about them. You notice a few things. Then, over time, you learn more. I am not sure if he has ever said this in an interview or a talk, but I feel like it is one of his strategies.
The answer is likely somewhere in the middle
As with many things in writing, taking either approach to an extreme can become problematic.
Describe too much and you let the words get in the way of the story.
Describe too little and we risk the reader not identifying with the characters.
For me, the key is to allow character description to serve the story rather than compete with it.
What do you think? Do you prefer detailed character descriptions, or would you rather have the author give you just enough and let your imagination fill in the rest?
If you are submitting short fiction, there are a handful of things that can move a story from the submission pile to the rejection pile almost immediately.
Here are ten that will lose an editor’s interest:
1. Use of AI
If a publication says it does not accept AI-generated fiction, take that requirement seriously.
It is much easier for editors to spot this than you might think. They have years of experience understanding how a story sounds that comes from an actual human. And there are also tools out there that can help identify AI. It is unlikely they will every mention AI in the rejection but, it is likely you will get secretly blacklisted.
I feel that there is an important distinction between using a tool to check grammar and spelling and asking an AI system to write the story for you. But every publication draws that line differently, so read the rules.
2. Incorrect Word Count
If the submission guidelines say stories must be between 1,000 and 5,000 words (like BITC) do not submit a 7,500-word story and hope the editor will love it enough to make an exception. Odds are it will be rejected immediately.
Going 50 words over may not seem like as big of a violation, but it tells us editor types a lot about the way you operate. You have either not read the word-count requirement or feel that it is a loose suggestion rather than a rule. We also wonder if you think it’s impossible to cut 50 words from the story, which tells us something too. For any story over 1,000 words getting rid of 50 should be rather easy.
3. The Wrong Type of Story for the Market
This one should be obvious, but it happens a lot.
If a publication wants lighthearted fantasy, your relentlessly cold-blooded serial-killer story is probably not going to find a home there.
Before submitting, spend a little time looking at what the publication actually publishes. Read several stories they have published (most publications recommend this). Read the submission guidelines.
4. Content That Crosses the Line
Every publication has different boundaries, but some material can quickly make an editor stop reading.
Racial slurs, gratuitous sexual content, misogyny, graphic violence involving minors, or cruelty included purely for shock value may be enough to end consideration. Once again, this can vary by publication.
Writers should also remember that editors are selecting material for an audience. Even if something can be justified as a crucial part of the story, it still may not fit the publication.
I should also mention that you can still cover a lot of disturbing or unpleasant scenes without describing them in detail. Oftentimes implication of a situation can actually be the stronger way to go.
[Warning: disturbing content ahead]
Seeing a child character we have grown to love get into a car with a stranger allows the reader’s mind to fill in the blanks in horrible ways. We don’t necessarily need to see what actually happens.
Sorry about that example, but if you were disturbed by it, it proves the point.
5. No Ending
One of the most frustrating submissions is a promising story that seems to reach the point where the real story is finally beginning, and then it just stops.
These are the worst for me because there is so much hope. I like the story; there is a good chance that, if it ends well, I will get to send out an acceptance email.* But if it instead just drops off, or wraps up in a totally unacceptable way, I am out.
To me it often feels like the authors have not put in the time to really think through what kind of exciting ending they can put on their story. I like the David Mamet approach of having the ending be something that is unexpected and inevitable. Another author (I can’t recall who at the moment) says your approach should be to come up with every possible ending, then pick the one that is the most unusual while still being plausible. This is often the best and most rewarding ending for the reader.
*Yes, despite what it seems, editors are probably more exited than you are when we get to accept a story.
6. Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation
Editors understand that an occasional typo survives even careful proofreading.
But if the first page is filled with misspellings, missing punctuation, random capitalization, incorrect dialogue formatting, and sentences that have to be read three times to understand them, the story is already in trouble.
You want the editor to be thinking about your characters and what happens next instead of trying to decipher what you meant.
Proofread your work, then proofread it again, then put it aside for a month and proofread it a third time. If you don’t want to wait that long, give it to a friend who is good at that kind of thing, then brace yourself for the embarrassment of everything you missed.
7. Using Someone Else’s Intellectual Property
Be careful when borrowing characters, fictional worlds, distinctive settings, or other creative material belonging to someone else.
Writing a story about your own characters stopping at McDonald’s is one thing, but writing an adventure starring Harry Potter is entirely different.
Fan fiction has enormous communities built around it, but that does not mean a commercial publication can legally publish your unauthorized Spider-Man story or Star Wars sequel.
References to popular culture are common in fiction, but taking someone else’s characters or world and making them the foundation of your story is a no-no.
Create your own world. Create your own characters. They are probably way more interesting anyway.
8. Derogatory Use of Brand Names
Real brands can absolutely appear in fiction. Our characters can drive a Ford, eat at McDonald’s, wash clothes with Tide, or put Goodyear tires on a truck. These kinds of references can actually help establish place, time, and character.
The problem comes when a writer uses a real company as the target of accusations. There is a substantial difference between:
“The Goodyear tire blew out.”
and:
“Goodyear secretly knew these tires were defective and sold them anyway.”
If your plot requires an evil corporation knowingly selling lethal products, you should invent a brand. No editor wants to take the risk of publishing something that carries any defamation risk.
9. No Clear Conflict or Objective
You do not need an explosion on page one.
You do need a reason for me to keep reading.
A short story has very little room to wander around. You need to let the reader know who the protagonist is, what they want, and why they currently can’t have it.
A description of a farmhouse can be beautifully written, but if I am three pages into the story and the farmhouse is still just sitting there while nobody wants anything, nobody fears anything, and nobody needs anything, I am probably going to stop reading.
Always give the reader a reason to keep going.
10. Humor That Is Not Funny
I know that humor is the most subjective item on this list. What makes one reader laugh may leave another rolling their eyes.
There are certain types of humor that lose me very quickly and, I suspect other editors share this view. Flatulence jokes are high on that list for me. Yes, some people find them hilarious. I typically do not.
I also feel that comedy needs to do more than just be there because it is funny.
Good humor usually comes from character, timing, expectation, contradiction, embarrassment, misunderstanding, or an unexpected but perfectly logical reaction. But it’s more important that the action around that comedic event is actually necessary for the story. If you are putting in humor just for humor’s sake, that is often a mistake.
In short, if the entire joke is that somebody farted, you had better have one spectacularly original fart for me to get a kick out of it, and it had better be essential to the story.
The Common Thread
Most of these problems come back to this:
Respect the publication guidelines and respect the reader’s time.
Read the submission guidelines, submit the kind of story the publication actually wants, and proofread it a couple of times.
Give your protagonist something to want, something standing in the way, and an ending that makes the journey worthwhile.
After all of that, there is a good chance the editor will still reject it.
I think we all know that is just part of the writing game.
But at least you have a better chance of them reading all the way through the story because you didn’t give them an easy reason for rejection.
Thank you for your submission, but unfortunately it just didn’t grab me…
It is easy to see rejection as a failure. We often assume that the odds simply did not fall in our favor. But there is another possibility that we writers do not like to consider:
Maybe the story simply isn’t ready yet.
You Are Too Close to Your Own Work
Accurately judging the quality of your own work is one of the most difficult parts of writing.
Because you created everything, you inherently know what every character is thinking. You understand the interactions behind every relationship and you can clearly see the setting in your imagination. When you read a scene, your mind automatically fills in details that may not be evident to other readers.
You may have read the story so many times that you are no longer reading what is actually on the page. You are reading the improved version that exists in your mind.
This is why rejection can be valuable.
An editor who turns down your story may be saving you from publishing work that does not yet represent your best abilities. In a way, rejection is protecting your brand.
A Little Pain Can Prevent a Lot of Embarrassment
Receiving a rejection is painful.
Having a weak story published where hundreds or thousands of readers can see it is much worse. I have had one story published that ended up in print that had a typo – my typo. As much as I love that story and getting it into print, I am embarrassed every time I see that. In the annals of this very blog, I often only notice typos and grammatical issues after the post goes live. It is easy to read past those little issues.
A rejection keeps an unfinished story out of that spotlight. It gives you another opportunity to reconsider the opening, strengthen the characters, remove unnecessary scenes, improve the ending, or rewrite the entire piece if necessary.
That editor may not have given you detailed feedback. Most editors do not have the time. Still, the rejection itself contains useful information.
Rejection Is a Chance to Return to the Drawing Board
Instead of immediately sending a rejected story to the next publication on your list, take a moment to reconsider it.
You do not necessarily need to rewrite the story after every rejection. One editor’s opinion is still only one editor’s opinion. However, repeated rejections should eventually trigger a serious review.
Look at the story as critically as you can.
Does the opening create a reason to keep reading?
Is every sentence, or word in flash fiction, necessary? My metric on this is whether the sentence or word in question serves to move the story forward or to develop the character.
Does the main character want something specific and is there a reason they can’t have it (creds to David Mammet)?
Is there enough conflict?
Is the ending satisfying, surprising and inevitable (Mammet again)?
If you haven’t done so already, you should give the story to a trusted reader who has not seen it before and resist the urge to explain what the story is about. Let the reader experience it naturally. When getting feedback from them later, pay close attention to where the reader became confused or where the story felt like it was dragging for them. This is an issue I see in many submissions.
Be Grateful for Rejection
The editor who rejected your story has done you a favor. Instead of allowing a less-than-stellar version of your work to appear in front of thousands of readers, that editor gave you an opportunity to improve yourself and your work.
If you allow the sting of rejection to pass take that message for what it is worth – an indication that something needs to change, someday a much better version of that story could be accepted.
When that happens, it will feel so much better because you used rejection to improve your story and yourself. You will be proud of the work knowing it is the best you can put forth.
When we write a story set in our regular world, we get a lot for free. If a character walks into a coffee shop, readers already know the basic rules. They know what coffee is. They know what money is. They know people are not going to solve an argument by casting a spell, opening an airlock, or consulting a sentient mushroom.
However, when we are writing science fiction or fantasy, the world in which our characters live cannot be taken for granted because these genera allow us to change the rules of reality. We can invent time travel, talking swords, alien governments, gods who answer prayers directly, or magic systems that run on memory, blood, music, math, or regret. This freedom is one of the great joys of the genres.
The challenge is that, as the writer, we have such intimate knowledge of the world we have created, it is easy omit something the reader needs to know. It is important to keep in mind that when some aspect of the world isn’t clear, the reader will default to assuming the story world operates like the one we live in today.
For comparison, a murder mystery set in Chicago does not need to explain gravity, police departments, elevators, dogs, or cell phones but a mystery set on a generation ship orbiting Saturn might. Does the ship have artificial gravity? Is there a police force, or does the captain handle crime? Are dogs extinct? Do people still use cell phones or do they have implants that allow them to communicate telepathically.
These details matter because readers are constantly trying to understand what is possible. They have to learn what is normal, what is impossible, what is dangerous, and what is merely unusual. That means clarity becomes part of the storytelling.
For example, suppose a wizard is trapped in a locked room. In a non-magical story, the reader understands the problem immediately. Locked room. No key. Trouble. But in a fantasy story, the reader may wonder: Why not teleport? Why not melt the lock? Why not summon a rat to fetch the key? Why not turn into smoke? If the answer is “because magic can’t do that,” the reader needs to know. Otherwise, the attempt at suspense becomes confusion for the reader.
I also want to mention very important concept called The Cost of Magic. I learned about this in Orson Scott Card’s awesome book, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Card outlined how there needs to be a price for using magic in fantasy, as the spell casters otherwise become omnipotent. While he talks about fantasy specifically, this is also true for technology in sci-fi, there needs to be limits to even the most advanced technological race or they essentially become all-powerful, which results in a very boring story.
I suspect this may sound backward as it is cool to think about a race that can accomplish anything and fun to explore that kind of power in a story, but a magic system where anything can happen at any time is not wondrous for very long. The problem with this is that it removes the challenge of conflict, which is the friction needed to develop stakes and drive the story.
Another special challenge of science fiction and fantasy is vocabulary. We need names for alien species, magical orders, invented technologies, rituals, and strange materials.
But we should spend those invented words carefully. This bring to mind another concept: The Shmeep. The Shmeep is a tongue-in-cheek terms for anything in a sci-fi or fantsay story that is something common to us but with a fancy-sounding name thrown on to make it more fantastical. For example, if you write a utensil for eating into a story that is exactly like a fork but call it a “frong” to make it sound fancy, that’s a shmeep. Please call a fork a fork and avoid using fancy words for things that would be almost certainly called what they are called today.
Note that when I looked up “Shmeep” there are a few varying definitions, but this is what I have come to understand it to mean from a writing perspective. If I am wrong about the definition, please enjoy the meta-level irony.
While I have spent a good portion of this telling you that you need to explain everything in the story world that is different than our current world, there is an exception to this. That exception is what I would call the “genera canon” that has already been established. The great Science Fiction writers and scientist that have come before us have established such concepts as space elevators, O’neil cylinders, and Dyson spheres. These concepts can be talked about in a science fiction story without much need for further explanation. However, if your take on these concepts has a special feature or some change to the core concept then you will need to elaborate on that. Also keep in mind that there are a few items that have been established that you need to be careful with: things such as WARP drive and Light Sabers speak to very established worlds that will frame your story as a clear derivation of Star Trek or Star Wars.
So let me wrap it up with this: a good rule of thumb is that more the world in your story deviates from the world we live in today, the more you will need to clearly explain the rules of that world.
Let me know what your experiences have been with your world-building attempts in these generas in the comments below.
Most great stories need a hero for us to root for but what makes for a good one?
Here are some key characteristics that work for me:
Relatable
A hero does not need to be exactly like the us, but we do need to understand them.
This relatability often comes from emotional truth. What tends to make them tick? What is interesting to them and why? This interest or desire isn’t their main goal in the story but can relate to it. It’s more about how do they operate and often hints at why.
One character that comes to mind as an example could be a Heavy-Weight boxer who loves to raise pigeons. The characteristic of being a boxer is rather one-dimensional but add in the facet or raising pigeons and he now becomes more interesting and gives us a broader character to work with. There is a softer side to this brute which makes him interesting. Here is a person who can crush a man in the ring but also cares for fragile creatures. We want to know why he desires to care for the pigeons. Is it because he has a hard time relating to others? Does he see hope in the way they escape every day and fly off into the blue because he wants to escape his life? Does he find solace in how they always return home to him, something he may not have gotten from the people in his life?
Morality
A hero needs some kind of moral compass.
That does not mean they always make the right choice. In fact, seeing them not make the right choice is often better as perfect decision-making makes for a dull character. But inside them, there should be a sense of right and wrong, and it should often be tested.
The hero’s morality can help to give a story weight.
When a hero is faced with a difficult choice, we tend to feel what is stake internally for that character. Will they make the choice demanded of their moral code or cross the line?
The best heroes are compelling because temptation costs them something. Having them, crossing the morality line can also give us great material to work with in our stories.
Adversary
A good hero needs a good adversary because opposition gives the hero shape. Much in teh way we do not have black without white, or a front without a back, a hero is defined by what stands against him/her. The adversary reveals who the hero truly is.
A strong adversary challenges the hero’s beliefs, highlights our hero’s flaws, and pushes them to grow. The villain’s actions should challenge our hero’s deepest weakness.
The villain/adversary is a kind of mirror. They reflect what the hero could become if they give in to their flaw. The better the adversary, the more clear and compelling our hero becomes. A great hero rises to greatness because of what stands in their way.
Goal
Our hero needs to want something. The hero’s main goal gives the story direction and is something that we can plot the story around.
The main goal is usually external: win a competition, solve a murder, defeat the villain, return home etc. But strong stories pair the external goal with the hero’s internal need.
The hero may want to win a competition, but what they really need to do is to stop measuring their worth by each victory. They may be tasked to solve a murder, but what they really need is to forgive themselves for a past mistake. They may want to return home, but what they really need is to realize they no longer belong there and can never go home again.
External goals are used to drive the plot while internal goals drive the character arc. Having a great character arc, which is essentially just showing the character change or grow in a positive way, is one of the most powerful aspects to storytelling. It is very rewarding to the reader as we can all relate. We want to see the hero become better because we, too, desire to be better.
Flawed
Giving our hero a flaw may be the most important ingredient of all.
Flaws create friction. They create bad decisions which have consequences. A hero’s flaw typically relates to a “sin” (action that will be taken or has been taken in the past) at the heart of the story which will need to be addressed before they can attain the desired goal.
For example, Tony Stark in Iron Man begins as arrogant, selfish, and careless about the consequences of his weapons. His intelligence is not the problem. His wealth is not the problem. His flaw is his moral blindness. The story forces him to confront the damage caused by his own choices. Only when he takes responsibility does he begin to become a true hero.
I am also reminded of Robert Zemecis’s interpretation of Beowulf in which the hero king’s sin was to sleep with the tempting demon that bore Grendel, who later came to destroy the town. His flawed decision literally came back to haunt him.
A great hero needs to be relatable enough for us to understand, moral enough for us to care, and flawed enough to change.
Readers love our heroes because they struggle, fail, rise again and are morally better for the experience by the end of the story.
Let me know if the comments below characteristics you feel are important for strong heroes in our stories.
Here are the checklist items I look for when editing my stories.
Is the need of the protagonist clear from the beginning?
The protagonist needs to have a goal. They need to want something. The quicker I can establish this, the better chance I have of the reader engaging.
Is the obstacle for the protagonist’s goal clear from the beginning?
This is the converse of the first item. There has to be an obstacle that stands in the way of the protagonist’s goal. A story where the main character is able to just breeze through the story and get what they want is not a rewarding story for the reader. Even kick-ass heroes need to have a weakness or flaw. Every Superman needs to have his Kryptonite.
Are the characters unique and memorable?
This is one I picked up from Stephen King when reading IT. That book has a lot of main characters introduced right away. Normally this can be confusing to the reader, unless you do what he did – he gave each of them memorable attributes to help us keep track:
Bill Denbrough: Severe stutter and natural leadership.
Richie Tozier: Compulsive joke-telling, comedic “Voices,” and thick glasses.
Beverly Marsh: Striking red hair and a dead-eye aim with a slingshot. Only female.
Eddie Kaspbrak: Constant reliance on an asthma inhaler.
Ben Hanscom: Severe obesity paired with a brilliant, analytical mind for engineering.
Mike Hanlon: The town’s sole Black youth. Had a deep knowledge of Derry’s history.
Stan Uris:Rigid logic, an obsession with order, and a passion for birdwatching.
Are the characters fleshed out, or are they just 2D stereotypes?
This aligns with the above “memorable” concept but goes a bit deeper. Even the secondary characters should have clear motivations to make them feel real. A reader can pick up on when you are creating a character just because it’s handy.
Is the ending rewarding to the reader? Is it surprising yet inevitable?
This one is a bit trickier to quantify. It is easy to feel that any twist you throw in at the end is enough to make it “surprising” but the ending needs to be earned and realistic and not one that is occurring due to chance. The word that is often used is “Payoff” and that is a great way to think about an ending. What is the reader’s return on time invested in your story?
Have you taken out all the parts that do not serve to advance the story or develop the character?
This one is my word lawnmower. It helps me a ton when I am reading through my stories for a second time. I may love a section and the way it flows but if it does not provide insight into the character or serve to advance the plot, it has to go. This is especially true for shorter fiction. In flash stories every word has to have a reason for being there.
Is everything clear and understandable?
This is more common than you might think. When you are the author of the story there is a lot of understanding and backstory inside your head that makes the words you put on the page very clear. This isn’t true for other readers. Clarity is also an issue when an author holds too much back believing they are building tension via curiosity.
Has the story been reviewed for grammar and punctuation?
This should be obvious but I think the tricky part is that we can read past some of these issues many times when editing our own stories. As an editor, one or two issues like this won’t cause me to reject an otherwise great piece but more than that and it can take me out of the story. Note that other editors may be more particular than I am.
Did I remove all of the adverbs?
“All” may be excessive, but in general adverbs make writing weaker. Try it on your own writing and see if anything feels like it is lost when taking them out.
Is the tense consistent?
Tense changes are useful for providing immediacy (present tense) or for revealing facts that have occurred previously (past tense) but writers get in trouble when they change the tense within the same sentence. Even within the same paragraph tense changes can be jarring to the reader. A good way to check for this is to have others read your story or record yourself reading your story aloud.
Have I let it sit for at least two weeks before revising it?
One of the best practices and one of the hardest to do. When I am done with a story, the first thing I want to do is to share it with friends and/or start submitting it. Resist that urge and get away from it. When you come back to it, you will be amazed at how different it looks.
Did I find myself (or did my first readers find themselves) thinking about the story after reading it?
If people are thinking about your story after they read it, asking you questions, telling you about some part they thought was cool, that is a very good sign. This is often a metric editors (myself included) use when they are considering whether or not to buy a story.
Is it interesting? Did I take out the boring parts? (Never waste a reader’s time)
This is another one that is hard to quantify. It is usually best to get this information from your friends that provide feedback for you. Asking them when it felt like the story was slow reveals this.
Keep in mind these are the checklist items that seem to work for me. Your mileage may vary.
Let me know in the comments below what you look for when editing your story.
I was in high school in the mid-1980s, which means I lived through the Valley Girl era in real time. I remember an older kid telling me: “Don’t even get out of the chair or I won’t even hit you.” (Yeah, we had a real weird double-negative talk going there for a while at our High School.)
But every generation has its own version of language and slang.
Today I am picking up language from my 13 year old: “peak,” “mid,” and “low key.” Something can be “peak,” meaning excellent. Something slightly disappointing is “mid.” And “low key” seems to be something that is true but in a casual non-exciting way.
I am also hearing a lot of “Let’s goooo!” as a term for something exciting happening and from a wider audience than just teens.
When I was a kid I recall my grandmother being confused when I had referred to something as “Awesome.” She was a school teacher and I think she felt I was using the word incorrectly. To her, I probably was, but to me it felt perfectly legit 😉
Go back a bit further to fast-talking movie chatter of the 1930s and 1940s and think about the kind of clipped, snappy dialogue in old films. In It’s a Wonderful Life, there’s a tough-guy 1940’s rhythm when Clarence and George get thrown out of a bar: “That’s does it. Out you two pixies go. Out da door or through da window!”
The 1980s were only about forty years ago. The 1940s were less than a century ago. And yet the language from those times already has a foreign feel.
Going back even further, old books ask more of the reader because of language. The sentences are overly wordy, abbreviations and contractions are odd, and the syntax feels awkward at times.
Take the opening of Pride and Prejudice from 1813:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
We would look anyone saying that today with a raised eyebrow. A modern version might be:
“All rich single guys want a wife.”
Shakespeare is another great example:
“Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
Today we might think that Juliet is asking where Romeo is, but she is really asking him why he has to be Romeo and belong to the enemy family. The context of the words have shifted over time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how languages changes over time because of a story I am working on. It’s set aboard a multi-generational ship traveling at 0.9c for 500 years. Generations are born, live, and die without ever seeing the point of origin or the destination. Twenty-three generations will pass aboard that craft. I have to think that language would change a hell of a lot in that time. If the ship has schools, archives, films, instructions, legal codes, songs, and AI systems preserving the original language, then people might still be able to understand older speech. But their everyday language would almost certainly mutate.
I can see meaning of common words changing over time. Shipboard terms would probably become metaphors. Technical jargon would become slang. New insults would appear. (And I am particularly looking forward to playing around with that last one.)
A phrase like “grounded” might lose its Earth meaning and become archaic. “Up” and “down” might depend on spin gravity or deck layout. “Outside” might mean the vacuum of space. “Weather” might mean radiation. “Sunrise” might be ceremonial rather than literal or forgotten altogether.
The fascinating thing is that language change would not just be decoration or a nice nuance. It will be a fundamental part of worldbuilding. Language can also be a great way for me to orient the reader as to what generation they are reading about, particularly if I need to flash back and forth in the story.
I can picture the last generation, getting ready to land the ship at the final destination encountering recorded instructions back from the time of the launch 500 years ago. These characters will probably understand the words, but they will sound the way Shakespeare sounds to us. I could play around with this fact and set up a nice bit of turmoil due to the misunderstanding of the context of some key words.
I am not sure how much I will ultimately rely on the drift of language over time in this story, but I am sharing it as an example of all of the challenges and opportunities language drift can afford us in our writing. It’s one more tool for the toolbox.
Let me know in the comments below whether language drift over time has played a role in any of your stories.
One of the most common problems I see in newer writers is the idea that mystery automatically creates interest.
It can, of course. Suspense matters. Curiosity matters. The reader absolutely wants a reason to keep turning pages.
But a lot of novice writers end up holding back so much information that it becomes difficult to care about the main character. This makes the whole story hard to care about. The reader becomes confused, and confusion is one of the main reasons readers quit reading.
There is a real difference between making the reader ask, “What happens next?” and making them ask, “What is going on here, and why should I care?”
Driving curiosity
Readers do not keep reading just because information is missing. They keep reading because they have just enough information that they want more.
They need to understand who they are following, what appears to be happening, and what kind of direction the scene is moving in. They do not need every answer right away but they do need enough clarity to form questions that feel meaningful.
If I open a story and a woman runs out of a church crying, clutching a torn envelope, I already have something to hold onto. I may not know what was in the envelope. I may not know why she is crying. But I understand enough about her plight to feel pulled forward. I have some open questions that keep me interested: Why is she crying? What is in the envelope that has her so upset? Why is she fleeing the church?
If, on the other hand, if the woman is crying and she doesn’t understand why or we are not given enough hints to suggest why, then that kind of mystery often creates distance instead of momentum. This is especially true if the reason for the crying remains open for a long time.
Withholding everything is rarely the answer
I think a lot of new writers believe that if they explain too much, they will ruin the suspense but usually the opposite happens.
When writers withhold too much, the story starts to feel evasive. Scenes hint at danger without defining any real stakes or conflict. The reader is expected to stay invested without being given enough reason to keep going.
You only need to hold back the key information
We do not need to hide a lot. We just need to hide the right thing(s).
Let the reader know the scene, the character’s emotional charge, and the general direction. Hold back the one crucial piece that changes how we interpret it.
Good mystery fiction is a great example of this. A detective can arrive at a crime scene, notice the broken watch, the open window, the missing photograph, and the mud on the carpet. This gives us a lot to work with. The writer is not starving us of information. The writer is guiding our attention while withholding the one or more facts that will reframe everything for us later on.
This set up feels satisfying to the reader because they are engaged in active discovery.
Suggest a direction
One of the best ways to keep readers hooked without becoming obscure is to suggest a direction.
Even if the final destination turns out to be different from what the reader expected, that sense of the story “going somewhere” is important. It gives the reader a line to follow.
If the story offers no direction at all, the reader has to do too much work just to understand why the scene exists. Sadly, sometimes a scene like that shouldn’t exist.
A few useful examples
I remember reading Shirley Jackson’s The LotteryIn high school. It’s a great example of controlled withholding. Jackson does not explain everything right away, but instead gives the reader a clear setting, a social ritual, and an ever-growing sense that something isn’t quite right. But she does it in a way where the story doesn’t feel vague. The withheld information is such that we don’t feel lost in the story or confused. She omitted just enough and that kind of precision is what gives the twist ending its force.
You can also see this in film. In Jaws, we do not need endless concealment to feel tension. We know there is a shark. We know the beach town is in danger. We know Brody is heading toward a confrontation. The intrigue comes from escalation and anticipation. There are specific details – in particular the sight of the shark – that is withheld in a way that builds wonderful tension. If you have a chance watch jaws again, it is interesting to see how little of the shark is actually shown. So much is revealed by showing us the effects of the shark but not the shark itself.
Readers want discovery
Readers love putting clues together. They love sensing that there is more beneath the surface. They love the moment when a scene shifts and something clicks into place.
If you want people asking, “What happens next?” then give them just enough to believe the answer will be worth it.
Hold back one or two key pieces but suggest a direction. Then let your story lead the reader into discovery.
A good question to ask while revising
When I am looking at a scene that is supposed to feel suspenseful or curious, I like to ask myself:
Am I causing the reader to leaning forward into the story, or am do I have them confused?
This is a lot trickier to answer than it seems. We know everything about the story so it is hard to fully picture where we might be leaving out too much. We often expect the reader to make bigger jumps and put more together than they often can because we know how it all fits. This is where clarity is once again king. Note that clarity is not the same as revelation. you can be clear and still withhold key information.
If the scene is clear about character, stakes, and objectives (telling us why we should care) , the reader will usually lean into the story. If the scene is built on a hazy reality with a lot of omission, the reader will usually drift away. I see this a lot in stories where the protagonist is unaware of where they are and what they are doing there. Starting with amnesia is a tricky bit. I loved the movie (and the book even more so) Project Hail Marybut I felt that aspect should have been done differently.
Let me know in the comments below what your thoughts are on how to omit key information and still keep the story engaging.
