How Writers Accidentally Sabotage Their Own Characters

Sabotaging your own characters usually begins with good intentions.

It starts with protection. You smooth an edge here so the reader won’t flinch. You explain a motivation there so no one gets confused. You add context, sympathy, backstory, and polish until the character feels complete.

Avoid Overcooking

And that’s when the trouble can begin. In trying to avoid writing a book with any two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, you end up overcooking things. Like Brussel’s sprouts left in the pot too long.

It’s not always easy to see. The structure is behaving itself. The inciting incident is doing its job. The midpoint arrives on schedule. Everything is technically sound, architecturally respectable, and yet you sense that the story is lying there on the page like a well-made corpse. You read it again, slower this time, hoping the problem will reveal itself. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t. The scenes connect. The events escalate. The mechanics hum along dutifully. But there’s no real pulse.

If you find yourself in this kind of place, it’s often nothing wrong with what’s happening. The problem most likely is who it’s happening to.

At this point, many writers return to plot, because plot feels mechanical and therefore fixable. Characters feel personal. But plot is only the delivery system. Characters are the payload. And when the people at the center of your story are mishandled, no amount of structural elegance will save it. The story won’t fail loudly. It will fail politely, competently, and without leaving a bruise.

Writing Only Half a Character

One of the most common character mistakes is only writing half a person. Chuck Palahniuk describes characters as having a head side and a heart side. What they think versus what they feel. Most writers pick one and assume the reader will fill in the rest.

The brilliant detective who can untangle any puzzle but registers human emotion the way a thermostat does. Or the hypersensitive protagonist who feels everything at full volume but never pauses long enough to examine those feelings or act on them. These characters feel underbuilt.

Good fiction shows how messy the overlap is. Take Hamlet. Intellectually, he knows exactly what must be done and he spends most of the play explaining it, to himself and anyone else who’ll listen to his thoughts. Emotionally, he’s paralyzed by grief, disgust, and doubt. What makes him compelling isn’t his thinking or his feeling in isolation, but the friction between them. He thinks faster than he can bear to act and feels too much to trust his own conclusions. The tragedy doesn’t come from ignorance. It comes from contradiction.

Real people behave this way all the time. They can make a decision they intellectually reject and emotionally regret, then defend it anyway. That tension isn’t a flaw in characterization. It’s the characterization.

When you omit either side, the character doesn’t feel mysterious or restrained. They feel unfinished, like a draft that stopped halfway through a sentence.

Making Characters Too Likeable

Another error many of us make is sanding characters down until they’re universally pleasant. Likeability is a branding concern, not a storytelling one. We can tend to soften our characters’ flaws, justify bad behavior, and round off edges until the character becomes inoffensive.

This quietly makes your character less interesting. Interest comes from friction, contradiction, and the occasional indefensible action. Characters worth following often make choices we wouldn’t, then defend them with unsettling logic. If everyone likes your protagonist, no one truly believes in them.

Side Characters Who Don’t Matter

Side characters aren’t there to loiter near the action. When a supporting character exists only to agree, explain, or witness, they’ve become a peripheral player. They appear because the plot needs someone present, not because the story needs them specifically.

A solution here is to remove that side character and give their reason for existence (to explain or witness something) to another, more important character. What’s important is that every character on the page must cost something. Time. Tension. Emotional energy. Narrative pressure. If you can remove a character and nothing collapses, they were never earning their keep. They weren’t supporting the story. They were cluttering it. 

Taking Too Long to Characterize

Writers love the slow introduction. Pages of backstory, childhood context, and personality framing before the character is asked to do anything difficult.

Unless your name is Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy, or you have a sock drawer full of Pulitzer prizes, I’d suggest you move swiftly in fleshing out any one character.

Readers don’t need a biography to care. They need a decision under pressure. Character reveals itself fastest when something is at stake and the character chooses, especially when the choice is imperfect. If it takes fifty pages to understand who someone is, you waited too long to challenge them.

Forgetting Character Counterbalance

Every strong trait needs a counterweight. Intelligence without blind spots becomes smugness. Confidence without doubt becomes noise. Moral clarity without temptation becomes branding.

Even charm can backfire. The smooth talker who disarms everyone might also talk themselves into a trap. The loyal friend who never questions orders might march straight off a cliff. Talent without a flaw is like a party with no awkward silences—pleasant enough, but utterly forgettable. Let your characters stumble on the very things you’ve trained the reader to admire; it’s the polite chaos that makes them feel real.

Characters should be betrayed by their best qualities at least once. That’s where texture comes from. Without counterbalance, characters don’t feel complex. They feel engineered. Strengths without limits aren’t depth. They’re slogans. 

Ghost Characters

Ghost characters are kind of the opposite of meaningless side characters. They perform actions that matter to the plot but have no meaningful relationship with the protagonist. They deliver information, trigger events, and vanish without consequence.

Readers don’t form attachments to ghosts. They don’t resent them, fear them, or mourn them. If an action matters, give it to someone who matters. Emotion can’t be outsourced. If the character doesn’t cost the protagonist something, the moment won’t cost the reader anything either.

Worse still, when you create a ghost character who does something meaningful but has little connection to the main character, you’ve missed an opportunity. An insult to your protagonist in the form of a witty barb is wasted on a waiter. Better to put the disparaging remark in the mouth of someone whose character is better brought to life by it, the villain maybe.

Missing Parallel and Perpendicular Characters

Stories need both parallel and perpendicular characters. Parallel characters reflect the protagonist’s path, showing who they are or who they might become. Perpendicular characters cut across that path, challenging assumptions and forcing friction.

Too many parallels and the story feels self-congratulatory. Too many perpendiculars and it feels hostile without context. You need mirrors and collisions, echoes and resistance. Character dynamics aren’t decoration. They’re how meaning emerges.

Characters Who All Enter the Same Way

If all your characters enter a room the same way, they’ll sound the same within a page. People reveal themselves immediately through habit. Who checks the exits. Who sits without being invited. Who strides into a room. Who minces in. Who fills silence. Who weaponizes it.

These details aren’t flavour. They’re shorthand. When everyone crosses thresholds identically, their individuality evaporates. Uniform entrances produce interchangeable people.

Forgetting Internal Conflict

External conflict without internal struggle is spectacle. Internal struggle without pressure is therapy. Characters should want incompatible things at the same time. Safety and recognition. Love and control. Truth and comfort. 

Let them wrestle with themselves like two cats in a paper bag. Let them make choices that would make a bystander wince, or sigh with recognition. The magic isn’t in the grand gestures. It’s in the tiny hypocrisies, the little compromises, the way they talk themselves into doing the wrong thing for what they think is the right reason. That’s where tension hides.

If a character isn’t divided against themselves, their choices feel mechanical. The most interesting conflicts often happen quietly, in the space between what a character wants and what they’re willing to admit.

Confusing Backstory with Motivation

A final mistake many writers commit is confusing backstory with motivation. A tragic past explains why someone is damaged. It doesn’t explain what they’re doing now.

Backstory without forward motion is pain with footnotes. Characters aren’t defined by what happened to them. They’re defined by what they refuse to let happen again. If the past isn’t actively shaping present decisions, it isn’t story. It’s trivia with mood lighting.

Stop Babysitting. Start Watching

Characters aren’t delicate porcelain. They’re stubborn, confused, and occasionally insufferable. They can survive being unlikeable, selfish, or just plain wrong. What they can’t survive is vagueness, inertia, or polite engineering.

If your story feels dead, don’t pile on another plot twist. Inspect your people. Chances are, they’re tripping over one of these mistakes. And like most human missteps, the fix isn’t harder work. It’s simply paying attention and making a subtle change.

This essay is one of a collection of pieces documenting the bedlam involved in writing and self-publishing my ongoing genre fiction series, The Misjudgements of Andy MacKay, available on Amazon.

Why Your Book Cover May Be Sabotaging You

What To Do Before Blaming the Algorithm

There’s a moment in every self-published author’s journey when the manuscript is finished, the last typo has been hunted down and forgiven, and a new terror emerges.

The cover.

 Creating Self-Published Covers That Sell

Do people judge a book by the cover? Uh, you betcha.

And so, when it comes to cover design many otherwise rational writers, previously capable of complex, higher-level thought, open a design tool and decide that what their book really needs is a moody sunset, an obscure font, and symbolism so subtle it could qualify for witness protection.

Or worse, they resort to something cobbled together using PowerPoint. And arrive at something similar to what that gorilla in the Atlanta Zoo used to paint.

Covers matter more than writers care to admit. Not because readers are shallow, but because choice now happens at speed. A cover is a brief moment of triage. Most self-published books don’t lose readers in the writing. Because most never make it past the first glance.

Here’s how to stop that from happening.

1. Accept that the cover is not for you

This is the first grief stage, and it’s unavoidable.

Your cover isn’t an expression of your inner journey. It is not a mood board for the themes. It’s not a visual poem. It’s an advertisement that must be understood in under one second by someone who has never met you and who feels no particular obligation to start now.

Covers fail when authors design for themselves instead of readers. You like it? Doesn’t matter. At all. Your preference is meaningless here. The only relevant question is whether the right reader instantly recognizes the book as something meant for them. If the answer requires explanation, the cover has already failed.

2. Genre recognition beats originality every time

Originality is expensive. Recognition is profitable.

Readers use covers as shortcuts. They’re not looking for surprises at this stage. They’re asking, “Is this the kind of book I already know I like?” A romance novel that looks like a literary memoir is not being bold. It’s being confusing.

Many self-published covers fail because they either try too hard to stand out and end up standing nowhere. Or they look like they were done by a five-year-old niece with a Commodore 64. The goal isn’t to be wildly different. It’s to be legible. You need to be noticed. But for the right reasons. Leave the flat vector art with overly safe, very boring, centred sans serif type for academic papers. “Quantum Effects in Quasi-Zero-Dimensional Mesoscopic Electron Systems.” That kind of thing.

3. Typography is doing more work than you think

Speaking of fonts, they have opinions.

They signal era, tone, budget, and competence instantly. A poorly chosen font doesn’t just look bad. It undermines trust. Readers may not know why a cover feels off, but typography is usually the culprit, lurking quietly like bad posture.

Common mistakes include using novelty fonts, mixing too many typefaces, or choosing something elegant and unreadable because it felt “literary.” If readers can’t read the title at thumbnail size, they won’t heroically zoom in out of curiosity. They’ll scroll.

4. Subtlety dies at thumbnail size

Online retailers do not reward nuance. 

Your carefully balanced composition, your gentle color gradients, your symbolic negative space all collapse into mush when reduced to a postage stamp. Covers must be able to work small first and large second. If the image, title, and author name don’t read instantly on a phone, the design is unfinished.

Many covers fail because they were designed at full size and never interrogated at the scale where most buying decisions actually happen. Zoom out early. Zoom out often. Be ruthless. 

5. Symbolism is not clarity

Writers love symbols. Readers love knowing what they’re getting.

A cover featuring an empty chair, a cracked mirror, or an ambiguous bird may feel meaningful, but meaning isn’t the same as communication. You’re better to exorcise all your clever symbolism in an art class. Symbolic covers work when there’s already trust. For unknown authors, it mostly generates scratched heads. 

If a potential reader can’t tell whether the book is a thriller, a memoir, or an experimental meditation on bird calls unique to the Marshall Islands, they’ll move on. Not because they’re unsophisticated, but because ambiguity is a tax they don’t need to pay.

6. Professional doesn’t mean expensive, but it does mean intentional

A professional cover doesn’t have to cost a fortune. It does have to look like someone knew what they were doing.

Many self-published covers fail because they look accidental. Stock images fighting each other. Lighting that doesn’t match. Text floating aimlessly as if hoping to be noticed.

Readers are remarkably forgiving of limited budgets. What they’re not is forgiving of carelessness. A simple, restrained cover with clear hierarchy will always outperform an elaborate mess trying to do too much at once.

7. Trends are useful servants and terrible masters

Cover trends exist for a reason. They work.

Ignoring them entirely is a choice, but not a neutral one. It’s choosing to swim upstream while insisting the current shouldn’t exist. At the same time, blindly copying the latest bestseller creates covers that feel instantly dated.

The sweet spot is understanding why a trend works and borrowing its grammar without plagiarizing its sentences. Readers don’t want déjà vu. They want familiarity with a pulse.

8. Your name is not the star yet

This one hurts.

Unknown authors often give their name as much visual weight as the title, sometimes more. This is aspirational and understandable and almost always a mistake.

Until readers know who you are, your name is metadata. The title and visual concept do the selling. A cover that treats the author as the main attraction assumes an audience that doesn’t exist yet. That assumption is visible, and readers notice.

9. DIY tools are not the enemy. Overconfidence is

Design software has become astonishingly powerful. This is both a gift and a trap.

The problem isn’t that authors design their own covers. It’s that they stop too soon. They confuse functionality with fluency. Knowing how to use a tool isn’t the same as knowing how to design. 

If you’re doing it yourself, study successful covers in your genre obsessively. Not to copy, but to internalize patterns. Good design looks inevitable. Amateur design looks like a series of decisions made five minutes apart. 

10. The cover is a promise, not a résumé

A great cover doesn’t try to communicate everything about the book. It makes a single, clear promise and keeps it. 

Many self-published covers fail because they’re overloaded. Themes, tones, subplots, symbolism, vibes. The result is visual noise. Readers don’t need the whole story on the front. They need a reason to open the door. 

The best covers understand restraint. They trust that once the right reader is inside, the book will do the rest.

A self-published cover doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be honest, legible, and competent enough to earn ten seconds of attention. Most covers don’t fail because they’re ugly. They fail because they’re unclear, insecure, or trying to solve the wrong problem.

A book’s cover doesn’t need to be loved. It needs to be understood. Preferably immediately. Preferably by the right person. Preferably before they scroll past and forget you ever existed.

No pressure.

What Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About Developing a Main Character

On Flaws, Fortitude, and Failing Spectacularly in Yellow

Homer Simpson is not intelligent. He’s not disciplined. He’s not brave in any traditional sense of the word. He panics under pressure, avoids responsibility with athletic commitment, and routinely chooses donuts over dignity. And yet, for over three decades, he’s remained one of the most enduring main characters in storytelling.

That alone should deeply unsettle any writer still clinging to the idea that a protagonist has to be competent, noble, or emotionally evolved to work.

Homer works because he violates nearly every polite rule of character design while obeying the ones that actually matter. If you want to build a main character readers will follow through chaos, humiliation, and poor decision-making, Homer Simpson is a masterclass in how it’s done.

Let’s break down the ten lessons he keeps teaching, whether we admit it or not.

1. Character Flaws Writ Large

Homer isn’t “a bit lazy.” He’s a gravity well of laziness. He’s not “impulsive.” He’s a walking demolition crew of bad ideas. His flaws aren’t seasoning. They’re structural supports. Entire plots exist solely because Homer cannot stop being exactly who he is.

This is where many writers go wrong. They give their protagonist a charming vulnerability. These might be anything: overthinking, mild insecurity, occasional doubt. And then they wonder why the plot feels underpowered. Homer teaches us that a main character’s flaw should be big enough to actively sabotage their own goals.

If your character’s flaw doesn’t routinely wreck their life, it isn’t a flaw. It’s a personality quirk.

2. Character Likability vs Realism

Homer lies. He cheats. He panics. He betrays people. He quits when things get hard. Repeatedly. And yet the audience keeps forgiving him. Not because he’s good, but because he’s honest about being terrible.

He doesn’t dress up his cowardice as strategy. He doesn’t call his selfishness “self-care.” He knows he’s weak. We know he’s weak. There’s a strange kind of moral transparency to that.

Readers don’t require virtue. They require sincerity. A morally compromised character who owns their flaws is infinitely more tolerable than a morally sanitized character who pretends they don’t have any.

3. In Characterization, Consistency Beats Charisma

Homer isn’t consistently likable. He’s moody, childish, and frequently unbearable. One thing he is, however, is consistent. We always know how he’s likely to react: impulsively, emotionally, and in the worst possible way.

That consistency builds trust. The audience may not approve of Homer, but they understand him. And understanding creates narrative stability.

A protagonist who shifts personality to suit the plot feels fake. A protagonist who stays stubbornly themselves, even when it ruins everything, feels real.

4. Humanizing Flawed Characters

For all his catastrophes, Homer loves his family. He loves them clumsily, selfishly, and with frequent lapses in judgment. But have not doubt, the love is real. That single emotional anchor rescues him from becoming unwatchable.

This is one of the most important character lessons in all of fiction: the audience will tolerate enormous moral failure if it’s balanced by genuine attachment. 

You don’t redeem a broken character by making them suddenly noble. You redeem them by showing what they refuse to completely let go of.

5. Let Your Protagonist Be Wrong. A Lot

Homer is wrong about nearly everything: money, relationships, parenting, work, health, loyalty, timing, and sometimes gravity. And he’s wrong with absolute confidence. 

This is why the story keeps moving. A protagonist who’s always right stabilizes the world. A protagonist who’s chronically wrong destabilizes it.

Certainty is dangerous. Overconfidence is radioactive. Homer reminds us that one of the fastest ways to create plot is to give the main character just enough certainty to destroy themselves at scale.

6. Character Motivation: the Cleanest Character Engine

Homer wants very few things. These include food, comfort, praise, and the shortest possible path back to the couch. What’s important is that his desires never change. And that’s exactly why they work.

Writers often overcomplicate motivation. Homer proves you can build hundreds of stories from embarrassingly primitive wants. The world may be complex. The protagonist doesn’t have to be. 

In fact, placing simple desire inside a complicated environment is one of the easiest ways to generate friction, comedy, and tragedy all at once.

7. Comedy and Tragedy Use the Same Machinery

Some of the best Homer episodes are funny on the surface and quietly devastating underneath. Think of these: losing self-respect, failing his family, realizing he peaked decades ago, fearing that he’s replaceable, discovering that his mediocrity is permanent.

The jokes land because the pain underneath them is honest.

Writers often separate comedy and drama like they require different engines. They don’t. They run on the same emotional fuel. These are loss, fear, longing, humiliation. There are others, of course. Comedy just lets us survive the impact.

8. Character Arcs: Growth Doesn’t Have to Be Meaningful

Homer often learns a lesson. And then, inevitably, he forgets it. This horror of impermanence doesn’t cancel the growth. It simply reflects reality.

Character development doesn’t require a straight, upward line. It can be circular. It can relapse. It can be temporary. What matters is that the insight feels real in the moment it occurs.

Permanent transformation is aspirational. Temporary self-awareness is human.

9. Self-Sabotage. Your Protagonist Can Be the Disaster

In many stories, the antagonist causes the chaos. In The Simpsons, Homer is the repeating weather system. The world responds to him like a slow-moving storm.

This is one of the most underused tools in modern character design. Writers want their protagonist to be heroic, reactive, justified. Homer shows us the power of making the main character the problem.

When the protagonist creates the conflict, every solution becomes personal. There’s no clean external villain to blame, only consequence.

10. The Audience Roots Flawed Heroes

Homer fails constantly. And yet the audience keeps rooting for him. They do so not because he succeeds, but because he keeps trying in the wrong direction with impressive commitment.

Effort creates momentum. Success only ends things.

Readers don’t bond with perfect execution. They bond with doomed persistence. They bond with the character who knows they’re outmatched and keeps going anyway—often for the worst possible reason.

Readers Don’t Want Perfection

Homer Simpson endures because he isn’t aspirational. He’s diagnostic. He’s the part of us that wants comfort over courage, snacks over self-improvement, and applause for showing up late. He’s who we’d be if discipline were optional and consequences had commercial breaks 

And that’s the quiet trap for writers. We keep trying to build heroes readers should admire, when what they actually crave is someone they recognize. Perfection is impressive for about twelve seconds. After that, it’s dead on the page. But a character who keeps choosing badly with sincere emotional commitment? That’s a franchise.

Homer teaches us that main characters don’t need to be noble. They need to be legible. They need wants that get them into trouble, flaws that won’t politely stay in the background, and just enough heart that we hate ourselves for rooting for them.

So if your protagonist is currently too competent, too controlled, and too emotionally tidy—congratulations. You’ve written a manager. Throw a donut at them. Let them panic. Let them ruin something important. Let them try again for the worst possible reason.

That’s not bad writing.

That’s character.

This essay is one of a collection of pieces documenting the bedlam involved in writing and self-publishing my ongoing genre fiction series: The Misjudgements of Andy MacKay, available on Amazon.

10 More Editing Suggestions

The art of gently setting fire to your favourite sentences

There’s a dangerous myth among writers: once you type The End, angels descend, your laptop glows briefly, and a fully-formed novel plops into existence like a ready-assembled IKEA bookshelf. No extra screws. No leftover parts. No mysterious plank you swear wasn’t in the instructions.

This is, of course, a lie.

The End isn’t the finish line. It’s the moment the real work shows up, lights a cigarette, and says, “All right. Let’s see what you’ve done.”

Editing is where your book stops being your emotional support project and starts becoming a functional piece of narrative machinery. It’s also where many writers discover their magnum opus is less “polished novel” and more “ambitious pile of narrative compost.” This is normal. This is survivable. But it does require strategy.

Let’s talk about what editing actually asks of you.

1. Finish the Draft First

Don’t edit while drafting. That’s a trap. You’ll end up with a folder full of polished fragments that never become a book. The first draft’s only job is to exist. Let it be clumsy. You can’t fix what isn’t fully written.

Polishing Chapter One before Chapter Twenty-One exists isn’t refinement. It’s procrastination disguised as artistic genius. You buff one paragraph to a catastrophic shine while the rest of the book remains a vague, frightened rumor. Finish the ugly thing first. All of it. Especially the chapters that make you want to hide under the desk.

2. Edit in Layers, Not in a Panic

Trying to fix everything in one pass is like attempting a full home renovation during an earthquake. You jump from sentence rhythm to plot logic to typos to character motivation and get nowhere.

Edit in layers. Start with the big things first: structure, plot, character arcs, point of view. Then move on to scenes. Then language. Then polish and refinement. Otherwise, you’ll spend three hours perfecting a metaphor for a scene you’ll delete without ceremony. It’s like polishing a Chippendale antique chair before you’ve checked that it can support a human bottom.

3. Cut Before You Add

Your drafting self was generous. Your editing self must be brutal.

Most first drafts are padded with repeated emotions, explanations, and atmospheric throat-clearing. The same idea is introduced, reinforced, clarified, rephrased, and then gently beaten to death with a pillow.

When revising, don’t reach for the “add more” button. Cut first. If a paragraph doesn’t move plot, character, or tension, it isn’t sacred. It’s clutter with emotional attachment. You can honor its service. Then give it a quick burial.

4. Your Opening Is on Trial

Readers aren’t patient. They aren’t kind. They aren’t your mother.

They’ll give you roughly one page to prove you deserve the rest of their attention. Your opening has to raise a question, create instability, and promise a particular kind of story. It shouldn’t explain the geopolitical history of your invented empire, no matter how proud you are of it.

Backstory isn’t a hook. It’s furniture. Move it in only after the guests agree to stay. If your opening bores, annoys, or confuses, nothing else you do matters. You’ll have failed before you’ve even begun.

5. Kill Weak Verbs Without Mercy

Weak verbs don’t offend anyone. That’s the problem.

“Walked,” “looked,” “went,” “felt.” They’re like community theatre actors. They function, but they don’t perform. Strong verbs carry tone, intention, energy, and emotional context without needing an entourage of adverbs.

You don’t need to “walk slowly with hesitation” when you can simply creep. Precision reduces clutter. It also makes your prose feel like it knows where it’s going. Unlike most of us. And remember this. If a sentence drags in verbs that do nothing it’s like inviting a dull speaker to narrate a car chase. Painful and avoidable.

6. Every Scene Has to Want Something

Scenes without desire are just well-lit waiting rooms.

Every scene should have a character who wants something, something standing in their way, and a shift at the end—gain, loss, threat, discovery, complication. If no one wants anything, nothing resists, nothing changes, you’ve written tasteful narrative wallpaper.

Moments of rest matter. But even stillness should be shaped by pressure. Otherwise, you don’t have pacing. You have drift. And drift is what sends readers to Instagram instead of page ten.

7. Hunt Your Personal Tells

Every writer’s got a tic. It could be favourite words, phrases, rhythms, or little obsessions that sneak into every chapter like a drunk guest at a dinner party. Maybe it’s a repeated metaphor, an action, or a flourish you swore no one would notice.

Your job in editing is to hunt these down. Decide whether they actually serve the story, or just stroke your ego. If a sentence exists only to remind you how clever you are, it goes. Yes, even that one you wrote at 2 a.m. thinking you were channeling Hemingway. Editing’s about the book, not your personal literary karaoke session.

8. Let the Book Rest Before Final Judgment

Fresh eyes are brutally honest eyes. After weeks, or months, immersed in your own words, you’ve probably forgotten what the reader doesn’t know, what’s confusing, and what’s just bad. Step away. Let the book cool off.

When you come back, your beloved sentences will look less like gold and more like slightly suspicious chunks of toast. That’s the point. Distance reveals clutter, over-explained ideas, and sentences that were “fun” at 2AM but now scream, get out of my story. It’s nothing personal. Your book is just being honest. 

9. Read for Momentum, Not Beauty

On at least one pass, forget pretty phrasing entirely. Read only for pacing, tension, and narrative drive. Does the plot sag? Does dialogue drag? Does the reader pause to check their phone for survival tips? 

Beautiful sentences that slow down the story are like expensive shoes that pinch. They might look great in isolation, but they kill the flow. Keep momentum king. If the story drags, the reader drifts. No one remembers your clever line when they’ve stopped caring what happens next.

10. Trust the Reader More Than Yourself

You’ll want to explain everything, justify every choice, spell out every emotion. Don’t. Readers are smarter than you think. They’ll fill in gaps, connect dots, and infer intentions you didn’t bother to write down. Over-explaining kills curiosity.

Hint, don’t lecture. Suggest, don’t narrate. A sentence that teases invites the reader in. A paragraph that explains everything is a polite shove out the door. If they can guess the next step, fine. If they’re slightly afraid of what comes next, even better.

Editing: Where Fantasy & Physics Collide

Editing’s where your book stops being your personal diary in costume and becomes an object capable of surviving other people.

It’s hard. It’s often lonely, sometimes painful, and occasionally makes you question your life choices. But done well, it’s transformative. You’re no longer just your own cheerleader. You’re a merciless curator, a sculptor, a demolition crew with a red pen. You’re the person who makes sure the book readers finally hold in their hands isn’t a vague, frightened rumor—it’s the story you meant to write.

It’s where fantasy collides with physics. Where effort replaces enthusiasm. Where discipline quietly outperforms inspiration while inspiration pretends not to notice. You’ll cut things you loved. You’ll defend things you shouldn’t. You’ll briefly believe the book’s irreparably broken at least twice. 

So finish first. Cut ruthlessly. Read aloud. Strengthen your verbs. Interrogate your scenes. Delete your darlings with formal apologies. Then step away long enough to forget what you were trying to prove.

When you return, the book will still be waiting.

Slightly embarrassed, but ready for work. 

This essay is one of a collection of pieces documenting the bedlam involved in writing and self-publishing my ongoing genre fiction series, The Misjudgements of Andy MacKay, available on Amazon.