I just got back from a writing conference where I met with a mentoring group for the purpose of critiquing and being critiqued. We were led by Gayle Roper, who has published many books and has a great eye and ear. She caught a pile of mistakes in our work!

Some of our errors seem to be universal—they cropped up over and over in our manuscripts even though we’d never met previously and no one had written us emails tempting us to all follow the same sinful paths.

So, since there are several glaring manuscript sins uppermost in my mind this week as I get my proposals ready to go out to publishers, I figured I’d share some of them with you.

The first is the one I am most guilty of.

Characters so focused on their own agendas that they don’t react like normal human beings to what is going on around them:

Let’s make a quick scene for a character with an agenda.

Sharon was thinking about the cute new boy in her math class as she walked to school with Julie. She wondered whether Julie thought he was cute or not. If Julie was interested, Sharon didn’t stand a chance.

“So what do you think of Barney?” Sharon asked.

“Barney?”

“The new kid in math?”

“Are you talking about the kid who—”

Before Julie could finish her sentence, a car screeched around the corner and smashed into a fire hydrant not fifteen feet from where the girls stood.

Julie screamed.

Water sprayed up like a geyser.

A man crawled out of the driver’s seat, getting soaked in the process.

“You know,” Sharon said, steering Julie away from the water. “Barney. The kid who just moved here from California. What do you think of him?”

How does this happen?

If we can answer that question maybe we can avoid making the mistake to begin with—it’s better to avoid the sin in the first place, than to apologize for it later, I always tell my rambunctious son.

My characters most often fail to react to things when I go back and edit my manuscripts. I write the first draft with my scene agenda in mind. For the bit I gave you above we can see that Sharon’s agenda is to find out if Julie is interested in Barney.

When I go back for a second draft I often notice that I was writing fast on the first pass and my characters are having conversations with no scenery to show us where they are. So I add in things. They are walking down the street. What does it look like? It’s a big city so there are cars going by. Then I begin to try to do two things at once. “Hey,” I’ll think, “this is a good time to foreshadow the accident that is going to occur in chapter thirteen. I’ll have a car skid around the corner. That will set up the fact that it’s a dangerous corner.”

So I’ll add in the car skidding around the corner. And then sometimes I forget that the characters have to react to the new element I’ve just added in.

How do we avoid this?

Even if we look for this as we write, it may slip into our manuscripts. And when we read our work we often slide right over this kind of error because we still have the same agenda we had the first time through.

I’ve found the best way to catch this particular error is to lay the manuscript aside for a month or two (or six if I have time). When I come back to it with fresh eyes I’ll be reading along with the story and it hits me that the characters have not reacted in a rational way.

Even better—take the manuscript to a critique group. The fresh readers who are not sympathetic to your agenda won’t be shy in pointing out that your character is acting like a cardboard cutout instead of a flesh and blood person.

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