Everybody has to start somewhere on their writing journey. We all have things to learn. I've published three novels, and I still have a ton to learn.

But there are a number of mistakes that are quite common for new writers to make when it comes to actually writing books and stories. Today, I want to share the top five common mistakes that I see.

Mistake #1: Editing too much too early

Years ago, I was a very unhappy lawyer who wanted to be a writer. So I quit my job. You don't have to quit your job to be a writer, but that's what I did. I quit my job and I decided I was going to write a novel, but I didn't know how to write a novel.

I started taking classes and managed to eek out a first draft of my novel, mainly because I Googled how many words are in a novel, saw 70,000, and just wrote until I hit that number.

So I had my first draft and I knew it was time to revise it. So what did I do? I opened the draft up and I just started fixing the sentences, sentence by sentence.

This was not ideal because I didn't even know if these scenes were going to stay in the book yet. I didn't even know if these characters were going to stay in the book yet. So what I didn't need to be doing was working on each individual sentence. That was something that could have come much later.

The mistake I made early on and what I try to help writers avoid now is trying to do too much editing too early. It's especially too early if you're trying to edit as you write.

That's the first common mistake I see, thinking you should edit as you go or thinking that revision is changing all of the individual sentences instead of reading it for the bigger story points.

A lot of writers work like this: they'll write a scene or a chapter and then immediately reread what they just wrote, picking apart everything from word choice to punctuation. Sometimes they’ll even do this with every sentence as they go along.

Just imagine. You write a sentence and then you stop and you edit that sentence. If you do that for the whole book, it's going to be really hard for you to ever finish your book. Why? Because you're stunting your creative flow and fostering a kind of resistance within yourself.

It's hard to ever get momentum in the story because you are immediately taking yourself out of it to tweak the language. Every moment you spend editing your work while you're still writing the first draft is a moment that you're not spending in the story, feeling the story so that you can keep writing forward.

I know it can be hard to let go of that compulsion to edit, especially for perfectionists, and I certainly relate to that. But you're not going to finish your first draft if with every sentence you are throttling yourself with a dozen edits and criticisms.

It's also going to be a lot less pleasant that way. So remind yourself, there will be time for revision in the future. That time is not right now. Your future self can revise, your present self is going to write, meaning feel the story and keep moving forward.

Mistake #2: Not developing the internal life of the characters

The second mistake that I see new writers make is not developing the internal life of the characters enough. Unless you're writing an extremely experimental book, your book is likely to have a plot.

Even if you're writing memoir, you're telling your audience about things that have happened to you, and that means it has a plot. That means you will have to spend time in your story describing the events that occur.

Things are going to happen, especially if you're writing a very plot heavy story like an action thriller. A lot is going to actually happen in the book.

However, in our quest to plot our stories well, we sometimes forget that an important part of writing a novel or memoir is the internal life of the characters. But that’s what sets a story apart from, say, a movie.

In a movie, we have to rely on seeing the action on the screen or on what the characters say to figure out what they're thinking. But in a novel or memoir, the reader can get into the heads of the characters. We can see the world from the character’s point of view.

As the writer, we get to tell the reader what our characters are thinking and feeling. And that's really important because, ultimately, it's why someone is reading a book.

So if your story is feeling stilted or dry or isn't resonating emotionally, you'll know it if you or a reader ever asks the question, "So what if this is happening to that character? I don't care."

If you feel that way, if you don't care about what's happening to these people, to these characters that you're creating, then you might need to spend more time exploring the internal life of one or more of them.

Mistake #3: The plot feels disconnected

The third mistake I see new writers make is having a plot that feels disconnected. Plots that not only keep readers engaged, but also make sense, are really important for storytelling.

In real life, every event has a cause, right? You want to be able to track cause and effect in your plot. This is called causation and it's critical for your story to actually feel like a story.

John Gardner has a book called The Art of Fiction, which I love. And in this book, Gardner calls it profluence—the idea that the events in the story are connected to one another. Event A causes event B causes event C.

This is a way of making sure that your story doesn't come across as just a list of events or a random assortment of things happening.

In the same vein, you also want most of the plot or character threads in your story to be relevant to each other—to touch on each other in some way. I kind of like to call it connecting the dots. Remember that game?

There's a game, like in the coloring books we had as children, where there were dots that were numbered and you would trace from number to number, and in the end you would have a picture. It's like that.

Connecting the dots by making events and characters related to each other, and not just randomly placed and dumped in the same bucket, elevates your book from randomness to a solid story. It makes reading it more satisfying and makes it feel cohesive.

Let me give you an example. My second novel, Privilege, is about a sexual assault that takes place on a college campus and the judicial process that followed, whether this victim got justice or not, and how she felt about that after the case was over.

In my first draft of that book, I had another character, another student who arrived on campus, and I tell the story of her experience that year at college.

She's at college, she's on the same campus, but in that first draft, that was the only way she was connected to the main event in the novel, which was the sexual assault and the subsequent judicial case.

So this character was just sort of living her parallel life over there. She had no connection to the main event in the story.

When I sent that draft to my literary agent, that's what she pointed out, this character isn't connected. “Can we connect this character to the main story in some way?”

So in my next draft, this character arrives on campus and she's interested in becoming a lawyer. She wants to be pre-law, so she joins a program at the university called The Judicial Scholars Program. This program involves being assigned to be a student advocate to students who find themselves in the judicial process at the university.

And she gets assigned the person who's being accused of sexual assault. Now she's connected to the main event in the story, and that dramatically improved the story because everything was more cohesive at that point.

Mistake #4: Not staying true to your own voice

The fourth mistake I see new writers making is not staying true to their own voice. Of course we all want to be like our heroes. I mean, I would be lying if I said I wouldn't give my big toe to be George Saunders.

But as Oscar Wilde once said, "Be yourself, because everybody else is already taken." You're the one who has decided to tell this story and you should tell it in the way that only you can.

Stressing yourself out about why your prose doesn't sound exactly like this writer or that writer, or why you are not as good as Lauren Groff, isn't going to make you a better writer. It's just going to paralyze you and make your voice sound forced, because it is. You're trying to be like someone else.

So give yourself the opportunity to tell the story your way, in your voice. I really believe that that's how you stand out in the long run and that's how you find the story you're supposed to be telling.

Mistake #5: Getting ahead of yourself

The fifth mistake I see new writers make is getting ahead of themselves and trying to do step 10. When you're at step one, working on a new project is usually fun and exciting. When you've made the decision to be an author, it's easy to get distracted by the bells and whistles that come later in the process.

And while writing a book doesn't have to be miserable, in fact I think it's pretty fun most of the time, it does take discipline. You can't get to the book tour or to your cover design without having the book done.

So trust your future writer self. That person will figure everything out, and this is true at every step of the process. You don't need to worry about revising when you're writing, you don't need to worry about pitching when you're revising and you don't need to be practicing your Booker Prize winning speech when you're pitching.

It's fun to dream and you should dream away. What I'm saying is, don't worry about these future problems yet. As my mom puts it, quoting my grandfather, "Don't borrow trouble."

When you start this journey, focus on setting milestone goals and meeting them consistently. Write the first draft, do your first revision, get some readers, do your second revision, and so on so that you can actually make it to that distant, big goal that you want to get to.

By the time you are sending query letters out to literary agents, your book will be in the best possible shape that you can get it in on your own. And quick tip, please don't send out your first draft of anything, ever. It's never a good idea.

Ready to write your book?

Now you know what not to do when writing a book, but how do you actually do it? Well, let's say you'd love to finally write your book, but you don't know how to find the time or you haven't written a creative word in years.

Or maybe you're the opposite—you have an MFA in creative writing, but it's sucked all the fun out of writing and now you're stuck.

As a three time published novelist and writing coach, I've put together a free training for you on how to write your dream book while holding down a full-time job.

In it I teach you the exact process I use to write my books. To get this free training, click below to apply to my program, the Book Incubator.

The application is just two questions. You can do it in under five minutes. There's no obligation to join the program, but if you're admitted, I'll send you that free training and you can watch it right now.

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