What is the worst mistake you discovered in revision?

Prawn · Dec 14, 2006

Stealing an idea from Oliveman's worst line thread...

What is the worst mistake you ever discovered in revision? I just completed my first novel, and here are some mistakes I found:

I had the characters walk up the same hill twice.

I described the undercover plainclothes police officer whom I then had wearing a badge and a peaked uniform hat.

I had lots of people magically getting up when they hadn't sat down.

I had a chapter-long frantic search for a girl...who had a cell phone on her the whole time. Why didn't anyone call it? Why didn't she call for help?

I spent a long time describing in detail a character's crawl through a tunnel, and then remembered that he had left his flashlight outside and couldn't see a damn thing.

Lots and lots of people "narrowed" their eyes. I cut it down to three or four in the whole novel.

What stupid things did you catch in revision?
Prawn

aadams73 · Dec 14, 2006

I had my main character acting on something she hadn't yet learned.

Serenity · Dec 14, 2006

I had a character apparently lose two years of her life in the span of three chapters.

I don't know if that's the worst, but it's the one that comes to mind.

triceretops · Dec 14, 2006

I had a captain who was insanely in love with his busted down intergalactic space freighter. He would get upset when any of the crew insulted it and called it his "flying oil refinery." Yet when he crash-lands on a planet, shredding his ship to pieces, he doesn't react at all or throw a fit as a result. Totally out of character!

Tri

PattiTheWicked · Dec 14, 2006

I had a character do a bunch of things on Saturday, and then get up the next morning and comment about how "tomorrow is Sunday". Somehow there was a warp in the space-time continuum.

illiterwrite · Dec 14, 2006

My worst: I had two characters getting married in a civil court in a certain province in the late sixties. This one persisted right up until nearly the galley stage, when I discovered it would have been impossible for my characters to do this (there WERE no civil marriages until a year later, apparently).

Garpy · Dec 14, 2006

I got the wrong calibre for a weapon, and that was in the Hardback edition. The paperback's due out soon with that corrected...phew.

triceretops · Dec 14, 2006

I have a planet called Nester in the habitable zone of the sun Aldebaran. It's quite impossible for this, since Aldebaran is a red dwarf and couldn't support a planet with life on it.

tri

FergieC · Dec 14, 2006

The first chapter of my new one had my teenage characters, travelling in two cars and communicating by mobile (cell) phone. Which was great, except that it was set in 1995. On the re-write, I had to start texting friends asking when they first got a cell phone - none had them back then.

Back to the drawing board on plot progression...luckily it was discovered on an early re-write, not after the whole book was finished!

Arkie · Dec 14, 2006

Inconsistent voice and style caused by reading too much while I'm writing. I am a chameleon writer and pick up other writer's styles. When I go back and look at several chapters, I've got a patchwork that looks like Annie Proulix's half sentences; Elmore Leonard's screen-writing style; Cormac McCarthy's stream of conciousness; James Lee Burke's swamp descriptions. In other words, I've got a damned mess.

seun · Dec 14, 2006

I forgot about one character entirely in the middle of a scene featuring a few people. She popped up again a chapter later and nobody asked her where she'd been.

I gave two unrelated characters the same surname.

A bloke working in a record shop started working through a stock delivery which hadn't arrived.

In the same book, a few characters go for an after work beer. A colleague tells them he'll be there later. They get to the pub and he is waiting for them.

sfecphory · Dec 14, 2006

I consistently forget character names. They will change 2, sometimes 3 times by the end of my first draft.

MidnightMuse · Dec 14, 2006

I've had a character's tattoo change which hand it was on. I've had them sit down several times without having stood up inbetween. And I've had the spelling of a name change from the beginning to the ending of the story.

And once, I missplaced an entire planet.

Anonymisty · Dec 14, 2006

My character sailed from one island to another in three days, but several chapters later made the same journey (under the exact same weather and wind conditions) in a few hours.

victoriastrauss · Dec 14, 2006

In a book with several groups of magical adepts, two of the groups had somewhat similar names. For an entire chapter, I referred to one group by the name of the other group.

I discovered this in page proofs. Neither my beta readers, nor my editor, nor the copy editor, had caught it (nor had I, over the course of several revisions).

Also spotted by me in page proofs, for another book: a minor character whose name changed about halfway through.

- Victoria

seun · Dec 14, 2006

MidnightMuse said:
And once, I missplaced an entire planet.

Look down the back of the sofa. If you lose something, it always turns up there.

MidnightMuse · Dec 14, 2006

seun said:
Look down the back of the sofa. If you lose something, it always turns up there.

Oddly enough, I found it in the dryer with my other sock

Mr. Funktastic · Dec 14, 2006

I changed a character's hair color/length about three times. He stared as a redhead with long hair, then went to short brown hair, and then ended up with curly blonde hair.

jbal · Dec 14, 2006

I had a character sit down when they were already seated. That's not bad though. The worst was I had a character whose husband was missing and presumed dead for several days. And in that time, nobody bothered to call anyone in his family or anything. Shocking, glaring oversight. And the worst part is, I didn't catch it on the second draft, my wife caught it. That was a head-slapper, and a good argument for waiting a bit longer before revising.

TrainofThought · Dec 14, 2006

I had my main character’s hair curly in one chapter and straight in another. The worst thing in revisions was ‘telling’ instead of “showing’. Now I’m going through another revision because of my chatty self.

ChaosTitan · Dec 14, 2006

Worst? Hmm, here's a couple, I'll let you judge.

*Consistently changed a character's eye color from brown to blue to brown again.

*Changed a character's last name mid-manuscript and didn't even realize it.

*Changed the time of year mid-manuscript from spring to autumn. The first half of the book talked about warm spring days, the last half about chilly fall winds.

*Forgot to resolve a major sub plot (in my head I knew what happened, I just forgot to inform the reader).

Saint Fool · Dec 14, 2006

erm .. My first sort-of-at-least-for-me-explicit sex scene. My male lead would have needed three arms and no one, not even an Indian contortionist, could have ended up in the position that my lusty virginal heroine did. Not to mention that clothing in the 1700s was not exactly flingable.

And I had a main character disappear halfway through a novel. She just "exited stage right" and never came back.

underthecity · Dec 14, 2006

I've just begun revisions for my novel which I completed in October, so I'm not that far into finding all the mistakes.

But a few I introduced as I wrote the first draft:

I didn't put the family cat into the story until midway through. His name started as Max, then later became Pumpkin. His fur color also changed from black (at the beginning) to orange later on.

The street the main characters live on changed names.

I think two of the secondary characters may have switched names at least once.

I know there'll be a lot more.

allen

blacbird · Dec 14, 2006

Starting in the first place.

caw

TheIT · Dec 14, 2006

Switching a conversation from the characters talking while riding horses to later in the evening when they were in camp, but missing a couple of horse references. My beta reader wanted to know how the horses fit in the tent.

What is the worst mistake you discovered in revision?

Writing is finite,revising infinite

A Work in Progress

NCIS...

Unleashing Hell.

keyboard monkey

Bored at work fanatic

a reader's ear and a writer's heart

Horror Man

Midnight Reading

Writer Beware Goddess

Horror Man

Midnight Reading

The name says it all.

A flowering bud of bitchiness

Around

Finestkind

Infuriatingly Theoretical