5 Things I Got (very) Wrong About Writing Craft

A set of early writing habits—picked up from TV, YA conventions, and online validation culture—did more to slow development than to improve craft. The biggest takeaway is that “writerly” instincts often come from what feels natural or impressive in the moment, not from what actually serves story clarity, pacing, and reader understanding.

First, the habit of ending every chapter with a cliffhanger came from episodic TV expectations. In her early middle-grade/adventure/mystery work, cliffhangers were forced and often “dumb,” adding random new elements just to create suspense—elements that rarely went anywhere. That approach made chapters feel engineered rather than earned, and it also encouraged a mismatch between technique and genre. Over time, she became anti-cliffhanger, arguing that the hook-at-the-end strategy only helps when it fits the kind of story being told.

Second, she equated writing speed with skill. Because online communities reward visible output and because readers are the proof, she chased faster drafting as a stand-in for craft. She could finish a book in one to three months as a teenager, then treated shorter timelines as progress. But the focus on volume replaced attention to scale and revision, leaving drafts that weren’t actually good. Speed could help some writers, but it isn’t a reliable indicator of quality or mastery.

Third, she believed everything that happened to a character had to stay in the manuscript. Writing in first person present tense—common in YA—made it easy to over-include because the narrative follows the character in real time. That led to bloated travel sequences, unnecessary technical explanations, and scenes that existed only because they “happened” (like an awkward hospital interaction she couldn’t realistically portray). The lesson: if a detail is a technicality or doesn’t advance the story, it can be cut without harming authenticity.

Fourth, she over-prepared dialogue. Instead of starting a conversation at the point where it becomes meaningful, she delayed the important topic through pages of setup and side talk. The result was awkward pacing and buried plot-relevant lines—an inversion of “get in late, get out early.” She later learned that scenes can work with minimal dialogue if the key line is delivered clearly, without padding.

Fifth, she struggled with clarity because she feared being “overt.” Professors repeatedly flagged confusion, and one instructor insisted that the story was close to publishable but would lose an editor immediately due to clarity problems. Her anxiety about exposition and stating emotions pushed her toward abstraction—implying goals, motivations, and feelings so deeply that readers couldn’t perceive themes or information. The fix was learning to tell more when needed: information is the basic unit of story, and well-written exposition can be unpacked on the page rather than hidden behind symbolism. The overarching message is blunt: subtlety without legibility is just obscurity, and craft improves when the writing serves the reader’s ability to follow and feel what matters.