The ten most common mistakes made by writers

And how to fix them

Over half term I was lucky enough to read 50 picture book texts for the Jericho Prize. Together with five other longlisting judges, my job was to rate each story and add a few lines of feedback.

The stories were all imaginative with amazing characters and lots of brilliant ideas. They covered a huge range of topics, themes and emotions.

I’ve been a longlisting judge and mentor for The Jericho Prize (which champions Black British picture book writers) before, but this year I noticed something different.

Almost all of my feedback ended up covering the same ten areas.

One of the reasons we started this Substack is because we believe knowledge is power.

The better your understanding of how the publishing industry works and the more you learn about developing your craft, the more chance you have of becoming a published writer.

If I’m honest, I almost changed the word ‘mistakes’ in the title of this post because I was worried it sounded negative.

I decided to keep it because mistakes aren’t negative - they’re how we learn.

If you’re making mistakes that means you’re putting yourself out there and following your dream. It means you’re writing. You shouldn’t ever feel embarrassed for not getting things quite right - literally no one ever writes a perfect first draft.

Over the twenty years that I’ve been writing I’ve made every single one of the ten mistakes I’m about to list below.

So that you can learn from my mistakes, I’m going to explain what they are and how to fix them.

Show don’t tell

It always has more impact if you can show the readers what a character is like, or how they’re feeling, rather than telling them.

Readers like to work things out themselves because it’s more satisfying and helps them feel more connected to your characters.

So, the difference between showing and telling might look like this:

SHOW - Sasha stamped her feet.

TELL - Sasha was feeling cross.

A lot of the manuscripts I read did more telling than showing. Once this is something you’re aware of, it’s an easy fix to make.