One major mistake writers make is “interfering with the book”. How? You may ask. Many writers find it difficult to allow their books to flow as it naturally should, they try too hard to be in control and this is quite some bad habit.
The readers can tell when your book is naturally developed and when it is manipulated.
Below are three things to avoid if you want to make a book that won’t experience a gigantic bounce rate.
1) Trying too hard to create a plot twist:
I know you are often advised to make your book a page turner, and to achieve this you’ll have to create plot twists and flashbacks. But this can backfire.
If you wrongly insert these elements, you’ll end up increasing the bounce rate of readers.
Have you ever read a book or watched a movie where you know that something should happen, but suddenly there’s a ridiculous plot twist that leaves you like “hey, are you serious right now?”
This is the reason telenovelas and Zeeworld suck. How can you walk past your mother several times, even talk to her and not know she’s the one when you don’t have a blindfold on? Whoever writes these scripts or makes these movies must really think people are jokes. I remember dumping the Indian movie Married Again because of this, someone putting a quite heavy necklace around your neck and you didn’t notice all day, when you were neither on a spell nor on drugs. Any other object? I might agree, but definitely not a wedding necklace, that’s insane. The house is a large mansion with a lot of things that could have shown her reflection, yet she didn’t notice, not even while cooking or bending over to pick up things. We all know wedding necklace is usually long and swaying, she must have felt it’s presence in real life, but the movie decided to fool everyone.
When you struggle too much to create a plot twist, people notice, they know this character wouldn’t act this way and it is just you trying too hard to control it’s life. Your book becomes ridiculous to the readers at this point and they hate your writing.
2) Controlling your characters:
Learn to create your characters and permit their natural inclinations. Allow them to live their lives freely, away from your “try too hard” control.
Learn to let your characters “live”.
Once you create a character, they become “fictional persons”, allow them to flow as such, stop interfering with their lives.
Sometime last year, I was seeing this American movie “Jane the Virgin”, and boy was I pissed!
I knew I couldn’t be the only one feeling this way, so I went scrambling the entire internet for reviews, I realized many people felt that way too.
Jane the Virgin was one of the movies I intentionally dumped in the bin, I didn’t finish it, each episode was more annoying than the former.
This is a typical example of when a script writer tried too hard to control the characters and it backfired. I mean, everyone could see that Jane was an entitled, hypocritical, judgy spoiled brat. Jane was mostly everything wrong, and naturally, if the characters had been allowed to flow, everyone wouldn’t end up licking her feet and accepting her wrongdoings as the perfect way of life. Among all the characters, Jane had the worst personality, yet the writer struggled too hard to paint her as an angel.
Things like this are what you must avoid in your book, script, or whatever you may write. Stop frustrating the audience because they know when you are manipulating the characters.
3) Controlling events:
If an event is going to occur, let it. If a character is meant to die, let them.
One thing some writers forget is that people can feel a book like they feel real life, they feel the characters like they feel actual persons, and feel the events like they feel real life events.
For this reason, treat your book like it is actually real. It doesn’t matter if it is fantacy or science fiction, everything has it’s own reality and if you switch from it, you are making a blunder.
I remember reading this book on either Webnovel or somewhere, the name of the book was “Trial Marriage Husband: Need To Work Hard”. Honestly, no book has pissed me off as much as that one did. The writer kept jumping around events, skipping necessary information and including unnecessary ones. Tang Ning and her husband Mo Ting were the gods of the book whom no one in the world compared to. No man in the whole of China compared to Mo Ting. These two characters were revered by everyone out of fear of being harmed, they were simply vile and malicious, yet the writer made an unnecessary attempt to paint them as angels and to control the events happening around them. From the ridiculous way Tang Ning’s rival miscarried just because she hated Tang Ning to how Tang Ning suddenly had a mysterious family that were billionaires when something slightly different was said earlier.
The confusing events made the book itself confusing and annoying.
This is an example of someone trying too hard to control events to suit their taste. Events in your book don’t have to suit your taste as an author, just allow what ought to happen to occur.
Now you have it! Things you must avoid if you want your readers to keep coming back for more. Simply put “don’t fool your readers”, no one likes to feel stupid.
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Originally published in 2022 on dilju.com
