The WORST Amateur Writing Mistakes | 22 Novice Writer Issues 

pov: you're procrastinating writing your book by watching this video

pov: you're meticulously taking notes because you're scared of messing up the first draft you haven't written

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” ― Tom Clancy

"Perfect, flawless main characters to whom nothing bad ever happens" Meanwhile, me, creating my main characters: How can I cause this person P A I N?

"fanfic-y dialogue tags" *me watching this to write better fanfics*

While I'm watching this my boyfriend is listening in the background Bf: oh you do that. Bf: and that... Bf: that too. Like ouch I know hun that's why I'm watching this in the first place 😅

for those who want it: 1-Tense Shifting 2-Info Dumping 3-Excessive Dialogue Tags 4-Over the Top Dialogue Tags 5-Repetitive Sentence Structure 6-Melodrama 7-Convoluted, Redundant Writing 8-Persistent Grammar Mistakes 9-Poor Scene Setting/Filter 10-Poor Pacing 11-Exposition Via Clunky Dialogue 12-Work That is Way Too Short or Way Too Long 13-All A Plot, No B Plot 14-Flat Characters/Poor World Building 15-Capitalizing Lots of Words 16-Head Hopping (shifting point of view with no scene break) 17-Telling 18-Poor Characters/Story Logic 19-Purple, Pretentious, Overwriting 20-Stiff, Hyper-Formal Writing 21-Character Soup 22-Perfect, Passive Characters

Can I add one more to the list? Every rule can and should be broken if it makes the story better. Usually you dont want the protagonist to be entirely passive, but there are books such as A Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy where the main protagonist is almost entirely passive and is simply dragged along through out the story. An other wise engaging story is not automatically rendered bad because it breaks any one of these rules, and following them does not guarantee any story will be engaging.

I’m prepared to apply some cold water to the burns I will receive.

It is worth bearing in mind - for authenticity - that characters can actually say stupid things, use the wrong words, and miss-hear others etc., and make misjudgments. Because that is what _real_ people do :)

The info dumping is so real. That is solved entirely by the “show, don’t tell” rule. If your character has a rocky relationship with someone, show us. And do it throughout the story, so you’re being consistent about it rather than implying it then just… forgetting you’d set up this concept. I guess that’s a continuity issue that tends to go hand in hand with info dumping pretty often lol

I personally disagree with the fanfic-y dialogue tag thing. I think writing "He smirked" Is a lot more streamlined than saying "He replied, slyly, with a smirk on his face". Just writing, "He smirked," Already conveys that he was giving off a sly tone, meaning that the point is conveyed quicker, and doesn't interrupt the pace of your story. Correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm open to criticism

My mother always wanted to get into writing, and she never did because she wanted to write in a pristine booklet, where every word would be chosen perfectly. She will receive euthanasia in a few weeks, and never wrote a story. So, biggest writing mistake? Perfectionism.

“Fan-fic-cy dialogue tag” My middle school self: *abort, ABORT*

i got one, i like to call it the "Conga Line Of Suffering" where a writher either cant or wont move the story along with out inflicting some sort of pain or sufferings on the characters. you see it alot in fanfiction.

3:32 tbh I blame schools for this one. I remember when I read books in school I noticed the authors didnt use dialogue tags after every line of dialogue so I experimented with not using dialogue tags every time but my teacher's would always tell me it was wrong to do that so I got into a mindset that I had to use dialogue tags even when I know they're not necessary but I have to force something in anyway

Pro tip for dialogue tags. If taking it out doesn't convey the feeling then rewrite the dialogue to convey the tag feeling. "Sit down," she demanded. "Staple your a$$ to that chair," she said.

* deletes entire manuscript * - * deletes word * - * tosses computer out of window * let’s find a new career path 😂🙈

On the too many characters point, I read somewhere that you can combine some of these characters, which I thought was a really good point! You know, you have a salesperson and a brother and a conman and run in with a childhood friend, and you could easily combine some of those! It serves the same purpose, adds more depth to the plotline, maybe instigates some complexity, and doesn't get rid of any of those essential plotlines that require secondary characters

my recommendations of things that really helped me out so far (writing a fantasy novel) 1. make different documents. one for your main writing ("the book"), one thats more like a keynote/summary or roadmap style of just important things / events, and multiple folders for: characters, items, monsters, landscapes /areas, magic, etc. with their own documents for each entity (a perosn, a town, a continent, a mgical staff, etc. all with their own attributes. i always keep a blank one ready to copy that already has (for characters for example): name, age, looks, motivation, magic, job, items, characteristics, likes, dislikes, other, and a list of the noteworthy dialoges the person says (or could say) to get a feel for them. ^^this is super important for me since a) i can build a complex world and even if some info (like the parents or background story of a sidecharacter) arent in the book itself, its important for me to make the world flawless and get a feel for everything and how it fits together ; and b) i always have to make bigger breaks in my writing, (months sometimes, for studying) which leads to me forgetting stuff, so i can always look it up again when i forget it, or add some fast info, if i have a good idea but am not at that point in the story yet. 2. think your whole story through. even if you wanna just randomly start with a scene you have in mind and see where it leads to, have a general goal and think about how you can make it more complex / more interesting whenever you go to sleep and have a couple min of silence :D. otherwise you will become frustrated when you have a good idea later but would have to rewrite earlier stages to make it fit in. same with characters. its good to have general ideas for each character, to make them compliment each other and come up with a good synergy. dont double them. for example if your prota is good in fire magic, dont put in another fire mage. at the same time, dont make him to op, leave the other chars some spotlight as well (smth they exceed in) 3. i like to mark the first sentence (as well in my book as in my summary/timeline thingy) of a new story section in blue and the VERY FIRST time, a character says smth (is introduced) in green. makes it super fast when you try to find smth or wanna check timeline things (aka "could he have known that already? did he know character x already ?or was that after....") i also mark anything related to time/currency or such numbers (prices, age increases /statings, season changes, time skips ("after 4 weeks of traveling"), etc.) in yellow. super important if you wanna have an overview on how old people are by now, how far distances are, how prices relate, what season should be by now, etc. even more so if you made a break from writing and come back into the story again. knowing "i can always look that up super fast again" really helps against burning yourself out and keeping everything causal and logical. 4. as said in the video ^^ give the antagonist a reasonable goal, smth you might not agree with but can understand. just plain out "bad" people are super fucking boring. like hitler for example is someone we all dont agree with, but his idea of keeping the gene pool clean is logically speaking not a bad thing. (if we could snip with our fingers and magically eradicate all genetic diseases, etc., we would do it. just killing all that dont fit that description is a BIT to extreme :D) 5. i personally hate it when there are forced problems. drugged MC, loss of powers or smiliar artifical restrictions that make characters either useless or dumb or do stupid things/ make stupid decisions. come up with some real problems and dont have that one stupid guy thats an asshole and has to poke the bear till it fights you. 6. i personally made the mistake of progressing character affection to fast. people (readers) love progress. if you start your MC op, its most often boring, if they have sex in the first page, its boring, etc. there are exceptions where its cool for the character to stay true to himself (with little to no development) but at least for the very main protagonist its prob better to go with slow but steady development ( or you will run out of interesting things to fast). as i said, i had a romance going on in mine, but the 2 chars fell in love way to fast and had sex in the first third of my story, which- so i noticed - took away a lot of tension. you want to tease the reader (dont overdo it though :D (dont go back and forth, steady development into one direction). at some point teasing becomes annoying instead of provoking). PS im still at my frist book and just an amateur writer (also, im german so excuse my english) so take the tipps with some bias.

I am a huge offender of tense shifts! In college, my professor wrote a note on one of my essays saying, “your tense shifts are making me tense.” Needless to say, I’ve been more mindful of my tenses... 😅

The thing I hate is when authors just stick arbitrary trauma in a character's past just to "flesh them out" but doesnt address said trauma in any real or consequential way. Looking at you, Kelley Armstrong. Or conversely, when writers give characters a Big Trauma and that is literally the only driving force behind their actions. It just feels like the author has no idea what PTSD is actually like and has failed to ground the character in any other real way. Real people are not their traumas! And I say that having been through serious shit! Characters should grow as should their relationship with their trauma.

Excessive descriptions/dragging things out was definitely my main mistake when I started out. My first "serious" story that I wrote when I was 14 or 15 was about a girl who runs away from home, and I spent 30+ pages on childhood flashbacks and "oh she feels SO SAD you guys!" while she was riding this horse into the night. I thought it was genius and super emotional.

Note to everyone: these aren't hard rules. As with all things, these are guidelines. She makes several great points but if you want your book to have very flowery writing, you can! It is a writing STYLE, meaning you can make it your own.

Character voice! You should be able to tell them apart by their voice. Everyone has a slightly different vocabulary, speaking style, most used phrases or expressions, etc. Some people talk formally and some talk very informally. I need to be able to tell who is talking. Also if everyone speaks exactly the same way it reads as fanfic-y

I love how in school you’re taught to switch up dialogue tags as much as possible meanwhile that’s like the complete opposite of what you need to do😂

I am proud to say I’ve literally never struggled with tense shifting since I started writing actual novels. But I also am humble enough to get ready to be roasted with these other mistakes that I’m sure I’ve made. Love these videos lol

I passed English class high school with a flying grade of 70... 10 years ago. This is my first attempt at writing anything creative and it's been a journey so far. Thanks for these great videos! it's really helping me procrastinate while learning more at the same time! You best believe my book has an astronomical amount of grammar mistakes in it that I have to go through and fix later.

You covered this already, but I just want to really stress: YOUR VILLAIN IS A PERSON TOO - CREATE & WRITE THEM AS SUCH, PLEASE!

I'm settling in to watch this and I just KNOW I'm in for a reckoning. Oh god.

My style of writing as I am told is very flowery and descriptive, but wayyyyyyyyy too many details. My goal is to get every aspect of the story, but it can become overwhelming and confusing for the reader. So, I find myself stuck, but reading other people's works help me narrow it down so it makes sense.

I'm learning to write by creating my own fanfiction story, and thanks to your advice, I've found that I need to rewrite all seventeen chapters. Including minor plot holes that I missed. It's not a big deal, but it would add more realism to the story. Thanks!

Me, on page 45, the plot *just beginning*, quietly slipping into the corner while she mentions pacing:

When it comes to self-inserting characters, I especially enjoy the ones who's character is based off of someone's experience rather than one's ego. It makes their character a lot more realistic and understandable because it's based off of real life experience, meaning that relating or understanding this character is a lot easier. As human beings, we have flaws. If we based our self-insert character on our flaws, then our self-insert character becomes interesting. But writers like to make their characters overpowered. I especially can't stand it when they do this in roleplays.

This is something I see a lot in manga, I hate it when authors spend chapters and chapters on backstory. Especially when they interrupt the main storyline at an important moment to give us the full backstory of the character. Like "X just managed to escape from his kidnappers, gets injured" - now you wanna know what happens to X next, you don't wanna spend 5 chapters reading about his high school days and how he got to know the kidnapper in his youth. In my opinion it's faaaar better to drop hints and short glimpses into the past, showing how they knew each other and why they ended up like this, so by the time the intense scene happens, you just need a final piece of the puzzle to understand the whole thing, and that piece can quickly be added without slowing down the pace too much. That's my biggest pet peeve when reading a manga at least :P

After working on my first story/book for awhile I stepped back and realized that all of the characters were basically the same person, because I didn't know how to make them friends without them agreeing all the time and that ended up meaning they all thought and talked the same. I struggled to create characters, they always seemed hollow and the same. I focused on worldbuilding for a time because that came easier to me. I finally came back to characters and have actually figured out how to do a decent job with them. I create their backstories and motivations (doesn't need to ever be included in the actual story but I need to know) and from there I ask myself How do they think differently? How do they speak differently? One thing that helps differentiate them for me and the reader really well is the speaking style. What words or phrases do they use alot and what are some they never use? Do they speak casually, have an accent or are they more formal?

Filler scenes are my biggest pet peeve when critiquing other people's work. I can take most of the other things, but there's something about making me waste my time reading a play-by-play of your character brushing their teeth then driving to go get coffee that really makes me want to put the manuscript down. A lot of the time, it's the writer not knowing how or when to end the scene, but a lot of writers seem to forget that they don't need to tell us the story in real time - cut to the action and the important bits. I've also seen the argument that these scenes help the reader "get to know the character" but you should be able to do that while also writing a scene that contributes directly to the plot.

I put down a book because of a dialog info dump. It wasn't a random character, but the characters sat down and one of them literally said, "Let's go over what we know," and proceeded to info dump the back story. Just, no. It was over a page, too. I don't know how long it was, in all. I stopped reading after a couple paragraphs. Ugh.

15:40 to be honest, i'll personally take that method over info dumping. it can be fixed to be more plausible, but it's flowing better and more naturally than paragraphs of exposition explaining the situation, suddenly coming out of nowhere

When I first stumbled across your channel, I was taken aback by your bluntness. A few weeks later, my writing is better and I appreciate the honesty. Thanks Alexa.

I learned to write by reading a lot and mimicking what I read. It‘s interesting to watch this video because I barely recognize any of those mistakes in my writing. I think the biggest mistake people make is not read enough cuz if you read it you‘ll instinctively pick up on a lot of things without being aware that you’re doing them. I do struggle with some of those mistakes still, I think mostly describing too much instead of showing it in what‘s happening but I‘m aware of it, I just lack creativity in this particular case 😅 but you can always go back and edit which is like 80% of my writing process anyway.

I would like to insert the other side of the excessive tags is the missing tag. A conversation is going on, not every comment is tagged, and it is fine, then there is that one comment that was not tagged and could have been said by any of the characters and the reader is left wondering. If the "voice" of the character is not clear, you need to tag it in some way.

Your like the mum of the writing community, you give criticism to better ourselves and really twist the knife, All got to say is THANKS!!

Would love to see another video like this specific to memoir/non-fiction. Really helpful! You’re describing all of the things I heard at my local “writing” group, which turned me off and no one spoke up about. I was new so didn’t say anything, and thought I was the crazy one cause I didn’t like most of the stories being shared. Thank you for the validation.

Idea for a video/series: read excerpts from Wattpad stories that we request through Insta twitter wattpad and yt comments and you give them critiques/feedback based on what you have read.

It seems like people often forget to mention...being too brutal &/or harsh with your characters is or can be just as bad and amateurish as being too precious.! Yes, don't be afraid to have bad things happen to your characters; BUT it is also okay to have good things happen to or for them sometimes too, that doesn't always only have to be saved up just for the big finale conclusion or whatever at the end of the book. (And that can actually help with developing subplots or worldbuilding sometimes too.)

The more I watch, the more I realize how guilty I am of amateur writing. I am working on my first story, so it's shouldn't be surprising. Thanks so much for this. I'll be watching more to help myself out. Writing is a mid-life career change for me and I am realizing how much I've forgotten about the basic writing structure I was taught back in primary/middle school.

You just opened my eyes to see the real beauty of writing! As a senior high school student, we have to write a lot of essays and stories so this was really helpful for me. Since English isn't my first language, it's kind of a challenge to me to be exposed in writing, expressing my thoughts into writing. Also, I like how you explain how such structures in writing is needed to be fixed or either be more creative and fun with it and not just sounding fancy and telling the reader the entire plot. It just made me realize a lot of things when it comes to it. Great job on explaining things. Thank you.

I've spoken English my whole life and I can't explain tenses 😂 I just use them on intuition.

Should I prepare my coffin before watching?

I’ve watched this video 3 or 4 times already in the lapse of a year. It’s so well put together, so informative. I enjoy it every time. I need to congratulate you. You do such a good job. Great work, indeed! Thank you for your knowledge! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Currently writing my first novel on Inkitt, still afraid to publish it. I’m not a native English speaker and I’m constantly rewriting chapters to make them perfect in my eyes. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I feel like this is what breaks my neck as a writer. As a amateur it’s nice to hear tips from a published writer. I’m glad I found you and this video was very helpful! Thank you 🙏🏼

“1. Tense Shifting” yup, this is the video for me

One that makes me crazy is a specific form of info-dumping / pacing. It's when characters are mid-conversation, and suddenly the story diverts into a bunch of narration - typically some back-story that sheds light on why the conversation is playing out the way it is, or a drawn-out exposition about the MC's current thoughts or feelings. It is very jarring, and unrealistic, to have a character mentally relive a prior event or wax poetic on their internal state during the minuscule time span between one character's line and the next character's response. Sometimes there is so much narration interjected into a conversation that by the time the dialogue picks back up, you've forgotten what the characters were even talking about. It's a really lazy way of abusing dialogue to sneak in an info-dump.

One editor said that you want a sentence to have as little words as necessary but still get the point across. And that's helped me tremendously. It's cut down on my "had"s and caused me to use better verbs or adverbs

i love this video because when it first came out, i was regularly guilty of all of these. now, i only struggle with a handful and even then, easily iron them out during edits. nothing gives me a confidence boost like seeing my own growth, and i come back to this video to do exactly that whenever im slipping into low self-esteem

Language that isn’t regionally appropriate always takes me out of a story. If the story is set in the US, it doesn’t take long to clock a native English speaker from another country if they haven’t researched and/or gotten someone from the US to weed out the things that don’t fit. Some basic examples that come up a lot in what I read: “flat” rather than “apartment” “car park” rather than “parking lot” “uni,” or “university” in the context where “college” would be more common (eg “I’ll be starting college this fall,” even if you’re going somewhere where “university” is in the name) “washroom” rather than “bathroom” The really sneaky ones, especially in dialogue, are small grammatical things: “meant to” rather than “supposed to” “smelled of” rather than “smelled like” “I’ve not” rather than “I haven’t” “in hospital” rather than “in the hospital” Obviously this isn’t specific to amateurs, but it might be something that an amateur writer is less cognizant of. It at least tells me that they didn’t completely do their due diligence in finding someone who’s from the place their work is set to give it a read. I know I wouldn’t be able to pull off a story set in England or Australia without a helping hand! Mayyyybe Canada. But elsewhere, no dice. 😂

I KNOW I SAY FACSIMILE WRONG. STOP TELLING ME. I KNOW. All the comments gleefully informing me that I am stupid are not productive.

I know you made this a couple of years ago, but I'm just now seeing it. Thank you so much, Alexa, for this golden advice. I've always made up stories since I can remember. Ten years ago, I tried putting one down on paper. Three years and multiple rejections later, I was about to toss in the towel. I just enjoyed writing so much that I couldn't quit. I shelved the book for four years and recently have been really working it over again. I've been getting a lot of tips and advice from RU-vid channels, but I have to say that yours has been the most helpful and eye-opening. I'm definitely a newbie to all of this. I'm not expecting to be the next Hemingway, I just discovered I love to write. Thank you again so much. God's blessings to you.

I just found you today and love how you explain everything. As someone that knows nothing and trying to figure it out, you make me feel like it’s possible!! Thank you so much!!

What does it say about me that my self insert character is the single most flawed person in the book? I think as long as you can recognize and accurately portray your self insert as a flawed human, they’re okay. But I definitely agree that those perfect self inserts drive me crazy

Some helpful advice I heard in regards to telling: use telling when you want to speed up the pacing and use showing when you want to slow the pacing down. I would get very anxious trying to decide whether to show or tell something; this advice made it much easier for me.

I'm totally new to the prospect of writing a novel, but I'm totally finding this incredibly valuable. Thanks for your time!

I love this review of errors authors can make! I took notes and am now going to check the manuscripts I am working on/editing!! So helpful even for a self-help book!!! Thanks so much Alexa! You’re amazing! ❤

Let's keep a tally: ✔ Tense shifting: only in draft 1. ❌Info dumping: working on it ✔ Dialogue tags: not anymore! ❌Repetitive sentence: shoot, guilty ✔ melodrama: nope ❌ redundancy: yeah guilty, too long of trying to get high word counts ✔grammar: not after draft 1 ❌filler: once again an issue with having wanted high word counts ⭕story pacing: getting significantly better ✔ Dialogue cheat: not in my past few stories ✔ word counts: always very aware of this ✔ missing B plot: thank you save the cat ⭕worldbuilding: I think it's good but not confident enough to give myself a check without beta readers ✔ capitalization: rarely ✔ headhopping: separate scene pov ⭕telling: in my first draft it is common, working on cleaning it up in revisions ✔ internal logic: lots of character building before writing ✔ fancy prose: maybe with characters bu not general ✔ formal writing: same as fancy prose ✔ character soup: I keep it limited or I'll loose ability to keep track ⭕ character problems: they're flawed and I cause horrible things to happen to them, but I'm working on agency Well... Not as bad as I thought.... But definitely lots of work to be done

In first drafts I ALWAYS start too early in the book. This always leads to a very boring beginning with no action and no reason for the reader to keep reading. I fixed this by diving right into the action. Instead of starting the book with the character in school I began with the character sneaking out with his friends during the night. It was more interesting and it gives the reader a reason to keep reading (To see what happens and if he gets caught).

Thank you for this! I have enjoyed it and am taking away plenty. You are NOT boring to watch, keep up the good work! :)

I can not tell you how much I appreciate these videos! I don’t know much about writing and i find this super helpful

Wow my own tears softened the burns I received!

Giving the characters agency to make their own mistakes is a double-edged weapon. Some authors hear about agency everywhere, and misunderstand it slightly. Then, they end up with characters that seem "actively stupid" instead of "stupidly active" :) (Often while telling the reader what a genius the character is...)

So far I have been applying several of these which makes me feel good hearing them here. Lots of other stuff I'm learning here. Thank you ! Truly appreciate!

A big mistake of mine in the past was excessive description and purplish prose because I was somehow convinced I *had* to do that to make the atmosphere and action more impactful. NOPE. I've found out thanks to videos like these and from feedback in my writer's group that it's okay to let things breathe and not choke every single paragraph with unnecessary description.

So a thought that I've had about info-dumping. It can be helpful to write that part out, but only for yourself. I was going through the book "the Black Prism" by Brent Weeks; and it occurred to me that something he did well was establishing the entire world as a going concern (the magic system, the history, the current situation, and so on) and then he had his characters act like people already familiar with all those things. So the protagonist talks about color wights, and doesn't explain what those are. He encounters a color wight, and you can tell *he* knows what a color wight is, but he doesn't tell you what they are. You figure it all out gradually, as the information emerges. It feels a lot more like the world existed already, and this protagonist went out into it, and we are figuring things out through their experiences. I want to try that at some point.

I really really struggle with rushed pacing. My stories are basically skeletons of stories and should have way more worldbuilding and charachter development. I think it's mainly a fault of my ADHD, I'm so impatient and want to get through the story quickly :( Basically I end up writing extremely condensed scifi "novels" that are around 10K words long...

This video is amazing! I am very new to writing. Just knowing things to avoid and look out for has made me feel more confident in my abilities. Thank you for this!!!

This channel is very low key and some of the best advice I’ve found on the internet as a whole

Admit it. You're here to improve your fanfictions.

31: 12 "You're allowed to use contractions." *head pats viewers* "Its okay." That made me smile. Thanks for my head pat.

I learn a lot from you, and I really think your humor really helps me pick up a lot that you have to say. Thank you.

10:46 - Purdue Writing Center tutor here!! One of the biggest things i see with students (and even myself lol) is subject-verb agreement! Thank you for helping creative writers/authors to create the best written art we can!

9:31 every dyslexic writer: *holds down “delete” until manuscript is entirely gone*

More! More knowledge 🥺 Alexa, would you mind talking of the genres that a becoming increasingly popular for Adult and Young Adult? Not only genre, but also elements that are increasingly popular (I feel like heists are one of them), and also the opposite of what's not so marketable with regards to both elements and genre? (I heard Aliens are doing poorly)? I know you made the dead genre video, and I'd love an update on that + some insider knowledge on what's becoming attractive! I'd be forever grateful!

Concerning dialogue tags, my current novel is actually a bit of a linguistic experiment in that regard, as I'm purposefully using no dialogue tags whatsoever and instead have the prose surrounding the dialogue clarify who is speaking at what times. So far, I think it's worked out quite nicely.

I’m close to turning 20 and I’ve been writing since i was 12 years old. I’ve been writing the exactly same story. A planned series of four books. The past years I’ve been rewriting the same first draft of the first book and i can’t seem to find an end because every time i finish something i get anxious and stressed that it’s wrong or not good enough. I’ve told myself to stick through it and just finish a draft and so in 2021 i did, indeed, finish my first draft. Currently I’m rewriting the parts that felt bad or wrongly paced or messy and I’ve cut out 18 side characters since. So needless to say, i had to cut out a lot of stuff that was surrounding said characters and now i need new stuff to fill up these spaces. I’ve been having such a hard time with it all, currently over-plotting and planning every detail, every chapter but i still feel like I’m doing it wrong or like it’s not enough or just not good. I don’t know where to start or where to end or what to keep in and what to keep out, how to properly share details without info dumping, how to make things make sense without confusing a reader, how to portray emotions and connections And all that despite being a writer for almost 8 years and always working on the same project. I know my characters and my world building and their stories and every detail like the back of my hand and yet.. i seem to be rather blocked and it’s demotivating, stressful. My only ever goal in life was to write this story but i can’t seem to do it. I’m afraid of doing it badly. I’m afraid of writing something that it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve been watching videos like this up and down, internalizing every tip i get but I’m just at a loss these days.

If this was a 'put your finger down if you do this challenge' I'd need two extra hands 😭

I’m an amateur, so I’ve heard all these criticisms at least once, but your explanations are practical and actually helpful. Imperative and not just declarative. Please make future videos that go deeper into each of these novice mistakes if you have time.

I like how simple this video is. Especially compared to other “how to write” vids.

Great video, I'm shocked people would be calling you stupid, as a writer I learned much from this video unlike other channels that just rag on "bad books".

I have to say, I LOVE that you're breaking your videos into sub-sections with individual titles so it's easy to find the specific issue you're talking about at each moment. I watch/listen to a lot of your videos at work, so I often have to pause and restart mid video to handle work issues. That makes it SO easy to go back to the beginning of a topic to make sure i didn't miss anything. Thanks for doing this (and the videos in general)! It's super helpful to have content I can listen to that helps keep my mind on improving my writing while I'm stuck at the dreaded day job. :)

Hearing some of these (and their fixes) are making me level up.... but man, writing a book is hard.

This is literally the best video I could watch right now. Thank you so much for all your advice

This might be the singular most helpful writing video on RU-vid. Thanks Alexa!

thank you so much for this content. i'm a fanfiction writer but this really helps me to write good quality fanfiction.. i'm so thankful!!

Hello Alexa Donne, everyone here to tell you that you're doing a great job! Your advice has really helped me on my writing journey.

Thank you, great snappy and all useful for an editing process! :)

Hello ! Wow I am super impressed by all of your knowledge. I plan to watch all of your videos . Thanks for making this video it has already helped me a ton . Thanks again.

the funny thing is, I try to just slowly get my readers into the world, by just dropping info that is relevant, but my writing instructor told me once that I shouldn't because humans didn't come up until like chapter 3, and she didn't know there were humans and so I should have stated that earlier, and I'm like, in the first two chapters, the humans don't even matter

Something I have noticed lately while reading, is when multiple characters in a book have the same language, and vocabulary. It gets confusing when the characters are exchanging words. Sometimes it can read like the main is talking to a mirror. Lol

This is very helpful! I try to avoid as many as I can, but now I see there is a few that I actually do. It will be great to come back to this video for help! Thank you!

Thank you so much for these useful advices ! I use way too many dialogue tags, and I never really noticed until now.