Top 10 writing mistakes

At the risk, therefore, of offering a deficit model of ‘creative writing,’ here, in no particular order, is my top ten list of common mistakes in unpublished (and unpublishable) manuscripts, on a scale of ‘Don’t do this’ to ‘For the love of god, no!’ In my early authorial career, I’m pretty sure I did all of these myself. I’m restricting myself to novels here, and I won’t bother with the obvious stuff about poor presentation, typos, and not reading the submission guidelines for now