Seven habits an editor spots before they've finished their coffee
An editor called Patrick Walsh, who has worked on more than a hundred manuscripts, reckons the things that make a novel feel amateur aren't the grammar mistakes. Those are the easy wins. Those you can fix in an afternoon with ProWritingAid, a spare evening and some patience.
The problems he sees — the ones that quietly radiate amateur-hour in a way the author can't spot because they're standing too close to the manuscript — are seven deeper habits. All of them, he argues, share the same root cause: distrust of the reader. He laid them out in this video, which is worth twenty minutes of your time.
I found it useful when I came across it, because I've done all seven. Some of them I still do. I've just got slightly better at catching myself. Here they are, in the order Walsh lays them out, with my own notes.
Mistake 1: Explanation addiction
You show the action. Then you explain what the action meant. "Sarah slammed the door, angry and frustrated, because Tom had forgotten to pick up the kids." The slam has already done the work. The rest of that sentence is the author standing behind the reader whispering, "did you get it? She's cross, you see."
The fix is embarrassingly simple. Every time you write an emotion word — angry, happy, nervous, sad — stop and ask whether you already showed it in the action. If you did, the emotion word is clutter. Cut it.
Mistake 2: Talking heads
Dialogue that reads like a well-edited TED talk. Everyone articulate. Everyone on-topic. Everyone neatly explaining exactly what they feel and why they feel it.
Real people in emotional situations don't do this. They fragment. They contradict themselves. They talk around the thing they actually want to say, or they fixate on something oddly specific — "Dad's already printed the business cards" — because the brain under pressure does peculiar things.
Read your dialogue out loud. If it flows smoothly, like a stage monologue, it's too polished. Let it be messy. Let characters interrupt themselves. Let them not finish a sentence. Let them dodge the question entirely.
Mistake 3: Point-of-view drift
You're writing a scene from Sarah's perspective. Deep in her head, feeling what she feels. Then, without warning, the narration slips: "Sarah hoped he would stop her. Marcus was already halfway across the car park, wondering if he'd made a terrible mistake."
We can't be in Sarah's head and also know what Marcus is thinking in the car park. She doesn't know that. So we don't know that either. The rule, at least until you've earned the right to break it, is one scene, one head.
When the POV slips like this, the reader doesn't consciously register it. They just feel that the story has gone slightly slippery, and they don't know why. Now you know why.
Mistake 4: Stakes that never land
"Everything would be lost." "The consequences would be disastrous." "Their whole world was on the line."
These feel like placeholder stakes. Things the author wrote in the first draft with the intention of coming back to later, and then forgot to come back to. They're generic. They carry no weight because they refer to nothing specific.
Specific stakes feel enormous. Six months of planning, gone. Twelve thousand quid of diving gear at the bottom of a lake. Jake's brother's bail due at nine a.m. and there is no Plan B. That's what stakes are meant to feel like — personal, human, and costly in a way the reader can actually picture.
If I can't tell you, in one sentence, exactly what your protagonist loses if they fail, the stakes aren't doing their job.
Mistake 5: Pacing plateau
Everything in your book moves at the same speed. Tense scenes, calm scenes, reflective scenes — all rolling along at the same dignified walking pace, with sentences of roughly the same length, flowing in the same rhythm.
Here's the trick. Sentence length is emotional temperature. Calm sequences can stretch out, flow, meander a little, take their time. Tense sequences should punch. Short. Fragmented. Choppy.
Broken.
Get the structure working for you and the reader's heart rate will follow the page without them ever noticing why.
Mistake 6: The first page starts too early
Your novel opens with your protagonist waking up, making coffee, catching a bus and noticing the weather. This is you warming up. It's the equivalent of clearing your throat before a speech. The reader doesn't want to watch you clear your throat.
The real story, in almost every manuscript Walsh has seen, starts on about page seven. That's where the inciting moment is. That's where the thing that actually matters happens. So start there.
The earlier stuff — the routines, the backstory, the setting — isn't always wasted. Some of it will need to be sprinkled in later, carefully, where it earns its place. But most of it, it turns out, isn't needed at all.
Look at your own page seven. Ask yourself, honestly, whether the first six pages were you or the story.
Mistake 7: Overwriting everything
Three sentences doing one sentence's job. Adjectives piled on adjectives. Rooms described down to the wallpaper pattern when we're meant to be watching two people argue. Weather reports when nobody cares about the weather.
"The rain fell heavily from dark, ominous, foreboding clouds" is four words longer than "the rain hammered" and does less work. The first version is the author showing off. The second is the author trusting their verb.
Walsh's rule of thumb: more than two adjectives in a row is overwriting. I'd tighten it to one. Trust your verbs. Trust your nouns. Trust the reader to fill in the gaps you leave. And trust white space — a lot of good writing is about what's not on the page.
The through-line
All seven mistakes, Walsh reckons, come from the same root: the author doesn't quite trust the reader. So they over-explain. They polish the dialogue so nobody could possibly misread a character's feelings. They slip into another head because it seems easier than letting the reader wonder. They pile on adjectives in case the noun wasn't doing enough.
Every single one of these habits shows up in the early drafts of books that later become bestsellers. They aren't signs of bad writing. They're signs of writing that hasn't yet been edited with the reader in mind.
The cure fits in a single sentence: stop explaining, start trusting.
Pin it above your desk. Ignore it when you're drafting — first drafts are for getting the story down, not for being elegant about it. But when the second pass comes round, run every paragraph through the seven-point filter above and watch your manuscript tighten up like a wet knot drying.
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