You finish a chapter, read it back, and something feels off. The scene is all there — the characters arrive, things happen, the plot moves — yet it lands flat. That gap between what you intended and what's on the page is usually not a mystery. It's one of a handful of recurring problems, and each has a fix you can apply this week.

1. Telling Instead of Showing

"She was nervous." It's clear, it's quick, and it does almost nothing. The reader is told a fact rather than given an experience.

Compare that with: Her thumb rubbed the rim of the mug until the glaze squeaked. Same information, but now we're inside the moment.

The fix isn't to ban summary — you'd exhaust a reader if every line were sensory detail. Long stretches of time need compressing. The trick is knowing which moments deserve the slow treatment. Usually it's the ones carrying emotion or turning points.

A quick test

Scan your pages for sentences built on was or were plus a feeling word: he was angry, they were relieved, I was embarrassed. For each one, ask what the body or the environment is doing instead. Anger might be a jaw tightening, or a chair pushed back too hard. Then choose one or two details — not five. Showing works through selection, not volume.

2. Verbs That Do No Work

Weak verbs force you to prop them up with adverbs. She walked quickly across the room becomes She crossed the room in four strides. He said angrily becomes a line of dialogue the reader can hear as angry.

Look for three patterns in particular:

• Verb plus adverb: ran quickly, shouted loudly, smiled brightly. Find the single stronger verb.
• Verbs of being: "There were three guards standing at the gate." Turn it round: "Three guards blocked the gate."
• Passive constructions: "The window had been broken by Marcus" hides the actor. "Marcus broke the window" doesn't.

Passive voice has legitimate uses — when the doer is unknown, or when you want to withhold them deliberately. Just make sure it's a choice, not a habit.

3. Clichés and Borrowed Phrases

Clichés exist because they once worked. Our hearts really do pound; blood really does run cold. The problem is that readers have seen these phrases so often they pass straight through without stopping.

Watch for:

• Her heart pounded in her chest.
• A single tear rolled down her cheek.
• She let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.
• He let out a sigh of relief.
• The calm before the storm.
• Little did she know.

Don't panic when they appear in a first draft — they're placeholders, and placeholders are useful. In revision, replace each one with a detail only this character, in this place, would notice. A farmer and a surgeon experience fear differently. That specificity is what makes a line feel new.

4. Rushed Endings

Endings often collapse because the writer ran out of steam, or because the word count was looming, or because the story's resolution was decided long before the characters had earned it.

Three repairs worth trying:

1. Name the emotional destination first. Before drafting the final act, write one sentence describing how you want the reader to feel on the last page. Then check whether the events actually produce that feeling.
2. Make the climax cost something. If the hero solves the problem without giving anything up, the ending will feel thin. What do they lose, abandon or admit?
3. Cut the explaining paragraph. Many endings improve simply by deleting the final few sentences, where the writer steps in to tell us what it all meant.

5. Information Dumps and Over-Explaining

Two characters who both know the history of the kingdom should not recite it to each other for the reader's benefit. Nor should a narrator pause mid-chase to explain a political system.

Let the reader stay slightly behind. Trust them to assemble meaning from context. Give information only when a character needs it — under pressure, in an argument, in a lie. Better still, let a character be wrong about something. A mistaken belief reveals personality and creates intrigue at the same time.

6. Scenes That Drift, Pacing That Stumbles

Every scene needs three things: someone wants something, something obstructs them, and by the end something has changed. If you can delete a scene and the story continues unchanged, it's probably furniture.

Pacing is largely a matter of compression and expansion. Summarise the flat parts — the journey, the meal, the week of recovery — and slow down at conflict. A single argument can carry three pages if the tension is doing work.

7. Point-of-View Slips

Head-hopping — sliding between characters' thoughts within a scene — disorients readers faster than almost anything else. Pick one viewpoint per scene and stay there until a clean break.

One subtle version catches many writers: describing your viewpoint character from outside. "Her eyes flashed with anger" works only if someone else is watching her. Inside her head, she doesn't see her own eyes. She feels the heat in her face, or notices she's stopped listening.

A Practical Plan for Revision

None of this needs to be fixed while drafting. Drafting and revising ask different things of you, and trying to do both at once usually produces stiff, cautious prose.

1. Read the whole piece aloud. You'll hear repetitions, sagging sentences and rushed transitions that your eye skips over.
2. Search for your tics. Every writer has a few — just, really, suddenly, began to, felt. Find yours and cut most of them.
3. Check one scene at a time. What does the character want here? What changes? If the answer is nothing, either cut the scene or give it a job.
4. Hunt the placeholders. Clichés, vague emotions, weak verbs. Replace them with something only your story could contain.
5. Hand it to one honest reader. Ask a specific question — "Where did you get bored?" — rather than "Did you like it?"

Good writing is rarely about avoiding mistakes altogether. It's about recognising them quickly and knowing what to do next. Learn these seven patterns, and revision stops feeling like guesswork and starts feeling like work you can actually finish.

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