In a post on Lit Hub, Thomas Foster identifies the seven deadly sins of writing. Surprisingly, the sins aren’t related to grammar, spelling, or run-on sentences. Instead, Foster says the worst sins are:
- Worry. “We worry about a host of potential negatives when we write,” Foster begins. “That’s why worry was first on the list: if it wins, all the others are moot. You cannot let worry win.”
- Self-doubt. The “companion that never leaves,” self-doubt causes us to question whether we have chosen the right words or defined our characters with care, but taken to the extreme, it becomes a disabler.
- Overconfidence. At the opposite end, over-confidence can kill our desire to learn, accept feedback, and improve our craft.
- Muddiness. “Muddiness results from lack of clear thinking, which can take a thousand forms: poor logic, unclear explanations, ambiguous motives, failures to wrestle the material into shape,” Foster writes. “The tricky part of muddiness is that, if our thinking is muddled, we may not see clearly enough to fix it.”
- Vagueness. Vagueness may mean a lack of concrete detail or a tendency to skip structural steps because we think our readers can follow along. “The solution is usually to burrow into the text, into the meat-and-potatoes of the subject, into the specifics of the issue, pushing closer when our first impulse was to work at a distance,” Foster says.
- Poor structure. Poor structure dooms many novels from the start, even if their failure is not evident until 100 pages are written. “Coming up with poor structure in the first place isn’t a sin; sticking with it once it proves unwieldy or unclear or simply unsuitable is,” Foster writes.
- Dishonesty. Calling dishonesty the one unforgivable sin, Foster says that our writing lacks legitimacy if we try to deceive our readers. “Writers live within a basic compact with readers, and dishonest behavior breaks faith with them,” he writes.
“The Deadly Seven prevent writing from occurring in the first place. Or, like overconfidence and dishonesty, they create something that is rotten at its heart, and no amount of surface grace can improve that sort of decadence,” Foster says.
