My Favourite Mistakes (Cecilia Peartree)

Just to clarify things, these are my favourite, or at least most frequent writing mistakes. If I started on the other mistakes I’ve made over the course of my life, it would turn into a book and would be entitled ‘What Was She Thinking?’, my preferred title for an autobiography. I present the top five list here in no particular order.

             1.     Every day a Tuesday

Not usually a month of Sundays but sometimes several Mondays one after the other, or a very long week at work for my characters, with no weekend to look forward to at the end of it. This kind of thing often strikes me when I do the very first read-through after getting to the end of a draft, and it’s why I write down a chapter-by-chapter outline at this stage and add the day of the week to each chapter heading, trying to iron out discrepancies as I go along.

 

2.     Overuse of gestures / facial expressions

My characters tend to recycle the same gestures to such an extent that they could be in danger of repetitive strain injuries from shrugging their shoulders or nodding too much. Similarly with facial expressions. It’s almost as if the wind had changed when they were staring, glaring or gazing, and their faces were stuck like that for good.

 

3.     Rambling sentences that go on and on without getting to the point and without any punctuation and end up taking up a whole paragraph to describe the internal monologue of one character about what they remember of looking at an old map several years before or whether they should cook something for tea or go to the fish and chip shop.

 

4.     Continuity errors

These are many and varied, and range from not knowing which character has already said what to whom, to unexpected and improbable changes in characters’ names and appearances over the course of a novel. The ‘dog with three names’ problem has only happened once as far as I can remember, and I hope the same is true of the woman who had brown eyes in chapter one and blue in chapter twenty-three. I try not to describe people’s appearances in too much detail because of this kind of thing, but I’ve randomly ignored my self-imposed rule when I start to picture someone as having green eyes, or red hair, or whatever.

Continuity errors across a series are also problematic, and for my longest series, now running to 27 published novels and one in progress, I have an Excel file listing all the characters I can remember and whether they’ve been a murder victim or a perpetrator yet. Even despite this, I still found myself having to download a previous book in the series from my archives while writing book 28, just to find a character's last name.

 

5.     Losing a character

By this I mean that I introduce a character at or near the start of the novel and then forget they even exist, which means that either I have to think of something for them to do later in the story, or possibly remove them altogether. In the novel I’m currently writing I have lost track of a whole catering company, but I hope to be able to catch up with them before the end.

Not a favourite mistake - leaving a jigsaw puzzle in progress on a collapsible table for a cat to jump on to!