There are a lot of good answers with good advice here already, but as per usual I have a few thoughts that I don’t think have been included in an answer, or haven’t been said in quite this fashion yet.
Speaking as someone who reviews ARCs before they are published, and reads a lot of stuff by writers from a variety of professional and educational backgrounds:
Not editing for spelling and grammar. Truth be told, I make this error sometimes with online posts. We all make spelling and grammar mistakes. However, if you’re going to submit a book for publication, I recommend doing a thorough spelling and grammar check of your book. Yes, I have seen multiple spelling errors in ARCs and even in published books. I think that self-published authors should spend the money to hire a good editor if possible, as I realize that some people are writing in a language that isn’t their first or may not know everything about spelling and grammar for various other reasons. Editors can also identify areas that don’t make sense, don’t read smoothly, or could be better-written another way—it’s good to have another pair of eyes looking at your work, regardless of your personal knowledge or situation.
Overestimating the originality of their premise, world, protagonist, or some other element of their book. Look, as a long-time reader who has read hundreds of books, I can almost promise you that your “idea” is not original. At the very least, it is made up of dozens of existing ideas that are not original. As much as I enjoy reading things that are new to me, I really don’t prize originality that much. Does your premise grab the reader’s attention? Is your plot cohesive? Is your world-building detailed and evocative enough to capture the reader’s imagination? Are the characters and plot elements of your book interesting to read about? All of those qualities interest me more than originality. Whenever someone presents a trope like “normal person finds out they have magical powers” or “guy goes to another world one day” as if it’s something remarkably intriguing that should immediately pique the reader’s interest, I can tell that even if their story is good they haven’t read around enough to know how common those ideas are.
In fantasy and other works where we’re in a fictional world/society—spending most of the first chapter describing that place from a third-person perspective. Some people find it annoying when this exposition is done via some character explaining things to the protagonist, and that is a bit unoriginal/awkward, but there I can tell they usually tried. It’s when the whole chapter is dedicated to explaining the world and its history with no plot action that it seems very amateur.
Having character reactions be way out of touch with how anyone would realistically respond to what is happening. I.e., science fiction characters being impressed at the technological advancement of the world they’ve always lived in. Characters in our world hearing about immortality becoming a real thing and not being particularly surprised or impressed.
Writing sentences that don’t make any sense. I don’t understand how people who have spent their whole lives reading books don’t understand capitalization, punctuation, and basic sentence structure. There are many stories I’ve seen, even fanfiction based on books that the writers have presumably read, that don’t use any sort of typical paragraph form or story structure. There are run-on sentences, incomplete sentences, dangling clauses, inappropriate or absent punctuation, unnatural phrases, and other forms that I have never seen in most published media. I genuinely don’t know why people believe they should write like this, given that most examples I have seen are by people who speak English as a first language, were taught some level of writing skills in school, and are familiar with most traditional media.
It’s 100% okay to write in a certain dialect or in an experimental fashion, if it’s consistent. For instance, in A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James uses a lot of Jamaican slang, spelling, and grammatical constructions, but he’s consistent with that. We, the readers, know what he’s doing there and why he’s doing it, and it makes his characters’ voices feel similar to how real people think and talk. Similarly, there are sections in some authors’ books which are deliberately written to evoke, say, the feeling of someone communicating psychically with another character or thinking through something in their heads. In those cases, however, it is pretty clear what the author is doing.
I am not talking about people who are in the process of learning English. People who are writing in English when it’s not their first language actually tend to be better about this, because they are writing in Classroom English that is limited in vocabulary and scope but very structurally consistent. When they do make mistakes, they tend to be consistent mistakes, such as not using indefinite articles if they are used to speaking a language that doesn’t have indefinite articles. Additionally, most of them are familiar with written media they have consumed in one or more other languages. I also don’t think that these people are bad writers when they do make mistakes, since they are surface-level mistakes unrelated to the content of their writing.
I am not talking about writing mistakes made due to disability, mental illness, or genuine lack of access to education. Those mistakes all have clear reasons behind them and I don’t believe in insulting them or making fun of them. I am talking about mistakes made by people who have all the “tools” to not make those mistakes but are still confused by writing.
I agree with Nyx Shadowhawk’s comments on common errors in fanfiction and other amateur online writing, but I have some particular notes to add in that department as well. I have read a bit of fanfiction in the past year and noticed a few things that I think are worth pointing out.
In romantic stories—not being able to explain why the leads like each other. (Most of these that I’ve read have two romantic leads, and usually focus on a woman falling in love with a man from the woman’s perspective. I can’t speak for other stories.) Often it is quite clear as to why the woman likes the man, but the reason he reciprocates her interest is never explained. It sometimes seems like he’s only interested in her because she’s a woman and she’s there. Conversely, there are stories where we are supposed to assume that it’s obvious why the woman likes the man, even when, in the context of the story, that’s not at all obvious. I get that this happens because readers of the story are likely familiar with the original work/franchise/intellectual property (IP) and find the actor who plays the character attractive, but it doesn’t explain why our female protagonist likes him, and makes the story a bit confusing.
Getting key details wrong. Unless a fanwork is explicitly taking place in an alternate universe (AU), or it’s clearly playing with setting and character a lot, certain aspects of an IP should be harder to misidentify/get wrong than they apparently are. I’ve seen one fanwork which described the main setting of the IP as a “hotel” when it clearly wasn’t, and another which said a character was Russian when they were explicitly referred to as German in the IP. I get that in more complex worlds where it’s not clear how things “work” it is easy to make mistakes and get things confused. I mean, I once messed something up because a character was referred to by their screen name instead of their real name throughout most of the film, to the point that I forgot they had a real first name. But some of the mistakes that people make could easily be remedied by looking at the summary and Wiki pages for the given characters and IP.
Describing situations that are too awkward and surreal to make sense. I realize that everyone has different life experiences and that speculative fiction allows for a lot of unrealistic situations, but sometimes the way that authors conceptualize things happening makes little sense even in the context of the IP.
If you write a story where all the Creepypastas live in a mansion together, or all the Avengers are living in a house together, that’s not IP-accurate but it’s at least a pretty traditional setup for a sitcom or ensemble-cast story and there are reasonable explanations for it. Maybe all of the Creepypasta characters are living together to avoid discovery, or all of the Avengers are living in Stark Tower so they can assemble at the drop of a hat to fight this week’s major Existential Risk. Some people will think it’s contrived, but it works.
Some fanfics I’ve seen have setups that make me think the writer has not seen how people interact before. For instance, I read a story where a young woman (presumably 18–25?) comes home to visit her parents and introduce them to the guy she’s dating, except for some reason her high school ex is staying with her parents while he is training to be a police officer. Then, she takes a bath, during which her current partner and high school ex start arguing in her bedroom, sitting down on her bed and chairs as if it’s normal for them to just be hanging out in her room. I “get” the general idea of having her new partner fight with her ex who still has a thing for her, but in writing you have to come up with a way to do that which flows a bit more naturally.
Making things that the reader would know, but the characters wouldn’t, a bit too obvious. I’ve read multiple stories where people who have no reason to dislike the villainous character automatically “know” or assume they are evil, even when they have no possible way of knowing that and the villain is not doing anything evil. When people who don’t know a character meet them, they aren’t going to automatically see them as “fascinating, dark, and mysterious” when they have no clue who this person is, unless they have some previous knowledge we don’t know about yet or are somehow psychic.
Similarly: all of the characters thinking a character is hot because the writer thinks they are hot, or paying attention to them because the writer thinks they are interesting. Just because you find a character hot, does not mean everybody will be staring at them as you walk through a college campus with them. If Loki is wearing normal clothes, people probably won’t know who he is and probably won’t be paying much attention to him. If Sherlock Holmes is walking through a college campus, most people will probably assume he is just a professor or grad student and think nothing of his presence. I guess since these characters are semi-well-known in some adaptations, that’s not definite, but I still think that characters’ mere presence in a story is sometimes overplayed.
Awkward stuff with self-inserts that doesn’t fit well. I don’t really mind self-insert fanfiction, if only because I really like reading about ordinary real-world people meeting and interacting with characters I like. I think there is a lot of relatability and humor in that genre even though I wouldn’t call it “literary.” That said I think some writing of that kind comes across as awkward in ways it doesn’t have to be. For instance, I recently read a story, that I actually really enjoyed, in which the author’s self-insert is dating the protagonist of an IP before the events of the film, and he eventually starts dating the woman he meets in the film. After her canonical death, however, he gets to see his ex again and “forgets all about” the woman he was in love with in the film. Except he didn’t have to “forget all about her” or even prefer the self-insert to his late second love interest, because his joy at seeing the self-insert could easily have been explained by the fact that for all intents and purposes, he lost any chance at being with her due to the events of the film. He could have still been in love with her from the beginning but tried to move on upon thinking he would never see her again, and been overjoyed to see her again once he realized he hadn’t actually lost her forever. This pathway would make sense without the protagonist pitting the two women against each other or picking a favorite.
In a similar vein: I realize a lot of writers, especially young ones, have self-esteem issues, but I always feel bad when I see authors put themselves down in their stories. I did this myself when I was younger, but it really only made me feel wores about myself. Now that I feel better about myself, I think: if someone’s writing a story about themselves, surely there are some traits that would make them interesting to the characters, regardless of who they are. I won’t pretend that I would get along perfectly with my favorite characters, but for the sake of a story I feel that having common interests would be sufficient enough to bring us into a conversation! Or if the character from the IP is tired of being seen as the chosen one, being attacked by their evil family, or some drama unique to their very special magical life, well, the self-insert presumably isn’t involved in any of that, so they could maybe just be a fresh face or a kind ear to listen.
In nonfiction:
Talking a lot about a topic without communicating anything meaningful. For instance, writing paragraphs and paragraphs about the importance of exercise in a relatively short book about how to exercise, whose readers presumably know the benefits of exercise. Alternately, writing a whole chapter of information the reader already knows—you can find websites, videos, and online chatrooms related to amateur radio; you should be wary of information you read on the Internet; you can find other people in your community who are interested in the occult; you can plant gardens in a creative way not explicitly described in the book. This is all filler information that seems to only be intended to hide the fact that the author doesn’t know much concrete information about their subject.
Claiming various historical/cultural/scientific facts are true with no good sources to back them up. I’ve seen authors reference random blog posts and web articles as if they are watertight sources when they absolutely aren’t. If you can’t find, read, utilize, and reference good sources on a topic, you probably shouldn’t be writing a book on the topic. I realize that there are often financial and material barriers to accessing many good sources, but there are also an awful lot of great free sources out there nowadays, especially on science and certain historical topics. With the Internet being what it is today, there are a lot of different places to find whatever information you need that any researcher should be able to figure out.
I’m sure I’ll think of something else later, but that will be for a different answer.
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