9 Writing Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Story

When Villains Won't Commit

This happens when your villain has a perfect opportunity to harm or eliminate your protagonist, but instead they monologue, leave the scene, or stall unnecessarily. McNulty calls this "pulling a punch," and it makes your villain look incompetent. The conflict will also feel manufactured in these moments.

The hero's survival needs to feel earned through skill, cleverness, or sacrifice. If your villain would feasibly just kill the protagonist when they have a chance, you need a creative way to get the hero out of that mess. If you can't, then maybe this isn't the right moment for the hero and villain to meet.

Otherwise, you can get more creative about their confrontation. Maybe they meet as equals, without violence. Think Heat's restaurant scene.

Check out how to write compelling villains who actually pose real threats to your characters.

Bringing Back the Dead Without Consequence

Character death should matter. In grounded, realistic stories, death needs to be final. Even in sci-fi and fantasy, where resurrection is possible, there should be clear rules about how it works.

McNulty says that if you're working in genres where resurrection can happen, "there should be a clear explanation for how this works, and it should be challenging to pull off."

The problem with casual resurrections is that they destroy stakes. When bringing someone back becomes necessary for your story, make it difficult, costly, and meaningful.

Learn more about killing characters effectively and what makes their deaths resonate.

Undercutting Drama with Jokes

You know this one. A character witnesses something devastating—maybe their home is destroyed, maybe they're losing someone they love. The moment should be heavy, emotional, and raw. Instead, someone cracks a joke that undercuts the gravity of what's happening.

Don't get me started. It's the Marvelization of drama and has been the bane of cinema over the last decade.

Humor has its place, but when you use it to dodge emotion in heavy moments, you're telling your audience not to take anything seriously. Let your sincere moments breathe.

Understanding tone in your screenplay will help you know when to let drama be dramatic.

Sacrificing Consistency

This happens when you betray a character's established personality for the sake of a flashy plot twist or cheap drama. Maybe you rush their motivations, or you have them act completely out of character because you need them in a specific place for your story to work.

According to McNulty, this means you "ruin a character's credibility by rushing their motivations or having them act out of character."

Audiences notice. Remember when Daenerys suddenly became Game of Thrones' power-hungry villain? It seemed to come totally out of left field, and fans were understandably upset.

Characters can evolve, but their transformation needs to feel organic and earned.

Read about developing compelling characters to avoid this trap.

Withholding Information Your Audience Deserves

There's a difference between a cliffhanger that makes audiences eager for more and one that withholds information they've already earned. If your point-of-view characters can see what happened, your audience should too. Cutting away at the critical moment just to string people along feels cheap and manipulative.

McNulty draws the distinction between "making an audience want more and forcing an audience to wait for information that they already deserve." A good cliffhanger creates anticipation because of what we know, not frustration because of what we're being denied.

Learn the difference between good and bad cliffhangers and how to use them effectively.

Relying Too Heavily on Contrivance

One or two meaningful coincidences in a story? Okay, fine. Reality is full of coincidences.

But when your plot relies on constant convenience, unlikely connections, and characters just happening to be in the right place at the right time, that's contrivance.

Audiences can accept some coincidence, but every time you lean on it, you're asking them to suspend a little more disbelief. Eventually, that goodwill runs out, and your story feels contrived rather than compelling. (McNulty uses the Skywalker story from Star Wars as the example here, but I'll hear no original trilogy slander, okay?)

John August offers a useful guideline. Premise coincidences are fine—like John McClane happening to be in the building when terrorists attack in Die Hard, or Peter Parker happening to get bitten by a radioactive spider. These kick off the story. But once your narrative is rolling, events need to flow from character choices, not lucky accidents.

Good storytelling requires intention. There's rarely a better feeling in a narrative when pieces fall into place naturally, and it feels real.

Making Characters Unkillable

Heroes are often powerful and skilled in ways that allow them to cheat death, but don't take it too far. If a character can take beating after beating and wound after wound with no consequence, then what's compelling about watching their journey? Give us the ups and downs of their plight, and that includes letting them get hurt now and then.

This invincibility, McNulty says, occurs "because the plot can't work without them."

Either don't put characters in situations they couldn't realistically survive, or show the real cost of their injuries. When characters shrug off deadly wounds like minor inconveniences, stakes disappear.

Understanding plot devices can help you avoid these kinds of pitfalls.

Fast-Tracking Expertise

Your protagonist goes from beginner to master in what feels like a weekend. They suddenly know how to fight, hack computers, pilot vehicles, or wield magic, whatever the plot requires at that moment.

This was a mistake John Boyega pointed out about his own Star Wars sequel trilogy. Becoming a Jedi or galactic superhero was ridiculously easy in those films.

Even when you're working with accelerated timelines, you need to show the work, establish that practice happened, or at least acknowledge that this character has been building these skills. Usually, this happens via a montage.

Show us the journey, not just the result. We want to struggle alongside the characters and share their wins.

Rescuing Characters via a Deus ex Machina

This is the big one.

A deus ex machina describes a hopeless situation that is solved abruptly by an unexpected occurrence that was usually not hinted at beforehand.

Your characters are in an impossible situation with no way out, so you have something completely unexpected and unexplained swoop in to save them. An unknown ally appears out of nowhere. A convenient object or power or piece of knowledge suddenly falls into their laps. A random force intervenes at exactly the right moment.

The term literally means "god from the machine," referring to how Greek plays would have actors playing gods appear on stage to resolve everything.

For example, in War of the Worlds, the seemingly unstoppable aliens who have been decimating humanity and are immune to all human weapons suddenly just... die. A narrator explains at the end that they were killed by bacteria that humans are immune to, but the aliens weren't.

Sometimes this device can work, but audiences don't always accept it. The simplest solution is to let your characters solve their own problems.

If you're going to introduce a saving element, it needs to be established earlier in your story. Plant and payoff.