Every manuscript is different. But the problems that appear in early drafts are remarkably consistent — editors who have read hundreds of manuscripts start to see the same patterns repeating across genres, voice types, and experience levels. There are 25 of these we see often enough to call common. Ten of them are universal enough to explain in full below; the other fifteen tend to be more specific to genre, structure, and voice — which is why they're better caught by an actual read of your pages than a generic list.
1. Slow openings
Opening with a weather description, a character waking up, or several pages of backstory before anything happens are among the most reliable signals of an early-draft manuscript. The problem isn't that weather and backstory can't appear in an opening — it's that they delay what the reader actually needs: a reason to care, a source of tension, a character in motion.
Fix: Find the first moment of genuine conflict, decision, or change in your first chapter and consider whether that's where the story actually begins. Cut backward from there. Your backstory can be woven into the narrative later; your reader needs to be hooked first.
2. Head-hopping
Head-hopping is switching between the internal thoughts and perceptions of multiple characters within a single scene, without a clear break to signal the POV shift. In close third-person or first-person narration, readers anchor to one consciousness at a time. When the narrator suddenly knows what another character is thinking mid-scene, it creates disorientation and erodes the intimacy of the perspective.
Fix: Assign each scene a single POV character and commit to it for the duration of the scene. You can know what another character is feeling only through observable behavior — their expression, their words, their posture — not through direct access to their interior. If you need multiple POVs, use chapter or scene breaks to signal the shift.
3. Telling instead of showing
This is the most cited craft problem, and the most misunderstood. "Show don't tell" doesn't mean never tell — it means don't tell us a character's emotional state when you can show it through behavior and sensation. "She was angry" is a label. "Her jaw tightened and she set the glass down too hard" is experience. The difference is the reader's involvement: one is being informed, the other is witnessing.
Fix: On your revision pass, flag every sentence that tells us a character is feeling something. Then ask: what would this character do, say, or notice if they were feeling this? Write that instead. The emotion should be visible in action and sensory detail, not named by the narrator.
4. Passive voice overuse
Passive voice — where the subject receives the action rather than performing it ("the door was opened by Marcus" instead of "Marcus opened the door") — isn't inherently wrong. It's useful when the receiver of an action matters more than the actor, or when you want to create deliberate ambiguity. But habitual passive voice drains energy from prose, creates distance between reader and action, and often signals avoidance of concrete subject-verb construction.
Fix: Run a passive voice analysis on your manuscript. A rate above 10–15% in most fiction genres is worth examining. Look especially for clusters — three or more passive constructions in consecutive paragraphs usually indicate a scene that needs re-energizing. Rewrite passive constructions as active ones and see if the prose reads more immediately.
5. Adverb dependency
"He said angrily." "She walked quickly." "He smiled warmly." Adverbs attached to dialogue tags and action verbs are a habitual shortcut for writers who haven't yet found the stronger alternative. The problem is that "angrily" is an abstraction — it tells us the emotional coloring without giving us the sensation. "He said, slamming his palm on the table" is specific. It's also more interesting.
Fix: Do a search for "-ly" across your manuscript and flag every adverb modifying a verb. For each one, ask whether the adverb is doing real work or whether you can replace it with a specific action or detail that conveys the same quality more vividly. Most adverbs won't survive this test — and your prose will be stronger without them.
6. Dialogue that serves the author, not the characters
This is what editors call an info-dump disguised as conversation: two characters discussing things they both already know in order to get exposition across to the reader. "As you know, Bob, our father died three years ago and left us this crumbling estate." Real people don't explain things they both know to each other. When characters talk like this, the reader feels the author's hand pushing the plot.
Fix: If you need the reader to know a piece of information, find a way to deliver it that serves a character's goal or creates conflict rather than just filling in context. Exposition through dialogue only works when one character genuinely doesn't know something the other does — and even then, find ways to let the exchange generate tension or reveal character rather than just transmitting facts.
7. On-the-nose dialogue
Related but distinct from the above: on-the-nose dialogue is when characters say exactly what they mean, feel, or want. Real conversations are almost never this direct. People deflect. They say the opposite of what they mean. They change the subject when something gets too close to the truth. They ask questions they already know the answer to, or joke when they're most scared. When characters speak with perfect emotional transparency, the scene feels false — and the reader disengages.
Fix: For each exchange of dialogue, ask: what does each character actually want in this conversation, and what are they trying to avoid saying? Then rewrite so the subtext does the work. What's not said should be as present as what is. The most charged lines of dialogue are often the ones that seem to be talking about something else entirely.
8. Inconsistent character voice
A character who sounds like a wry, detached observer in chapter two and an emotionally transparent, earnest narrator in chapter eight — without any in-story reason for the shift — signals that the author hasn't fully inhabited the character's perspective. Voice is one of the hardest things to maintain over the length of a novel, and inconsistencies are genuinely difficult to catch in self-editing because you know the character so well you fill in the gaps.
Fix: On a revision pass, read all of one character's dialogue and interiority in sequence, skimming the surrounding narrative. You'll hear the inconsistencies more clearly in this format than you will reading chronologically. Define your character's voice with three or four specific qualities — their verbal tics, their emotional register, what they notice and what they ignore — and use those as a checklist.
9. Pacing problems
Manuscripts tend to fail at pacing in one of two ways: all-action drafts where every scene is high-stakes and nothing breathes, or all-reflection drafts where the interior life is rich but nothing moves. Both lose readers — one from exhaustion, the other from inertia. Effective pacing is about variation: the emotional contrast between a tense scene and a quieter one makes both feel more intense than either would feel alone.
Fix: Map your scenes on a simple scale of external intensity (how much is happening plot-wise) and internal intensity (how emotionally significant is this for the POV character). If several consecutive scenes score high on both axes, add a scene that functions as a breather — character interaction without crisis, a moment of reflection, a scene that develops relationship rather than advancing conflict. Pacing is rhythm; rhythm requires variation.
10. Unearned emotional moments
The climactic scene where a character finally breaks down — and the reader feels nothing. The death that should devastate — and instead feels like an inconvenience. Unearned emotional moments are usually the result of insufficient setup: the reader hasn't spent enough time with the relationship, the stakes haven't been made viscerally clear, or the character's emotional arc hasn't been built carefully enough to make the payoff land. The author knows what they intend; the text hasn't delivered it yet.
Fix: Work backward from the emotional moment you want the reader to experience. What does the reader need to have felt, understood, and cared about for that moment to hit? Then check whether those things have actually been established in the preceding chapters — not assumed, but shown. If the climactic scene requires grief, has the reader been given enough time with the relationship that the loss genuinely matters? If not, that time needs to be added earlier.
So, what about the other 15?
These ten cover the mistakes almost every early draft shares, regardless of genre or voice. The remaining fifteen are real, but they're not universal — they're the ones that only show up once you're looking at your specific manuscript: a POV consistency issue tied to your particular narrator, a pacing dip unique to your act two, a dialogue habit that only your protagonist has, formatting quirks that will trip up beta readers, agents, or KDP's own upload checker. No generic list can name those for you, because they belong to your pages, not to fiction in general.
That's exactly what our manuscript roast is built to find. Upload your manuscript and we'll flag the other 15 — the specific issues, not the generic ones — so you can fix them and send your pages to beta readers, agents, publishers, or KDP without wondering what you missed.