Spent 2 hours writing a story about a detective who solves crimes by eating burritos... only to realize I'd described the murder weapon wrong on page 1

I had the killer using a cheese grater but called it a whisk for 15 pages. Had to rewrite the whole opening scene because nobody gets killed with a whisk unless you're really creative.

2 comments

2 Comments

evan_harris145d ago

Get this - I once plotted out an entire mystery novel where the crucial clue was a missing left shoe. Only problem was I forgot that the victim was described as missing their right foot on page 3. So basically the whole thing fell apart because I couldn't keep track of which side was which. Had to go back and swap every single mention of left and right which was a nightmare but at least I caught it before anyone else read it. Writing is just fixing your own dumb mistakes over and over until it sort of works.

richard_ramirez5d ago

The foot thing is rough but honestly that's a rookie mistake compared to what I did once... I wrote a 50 page script for a noir detective series and had the main character's car change from a '72 Chevelle to a '78 Trans Am between chapters because I couldn't keep my classic cars straight. Nobody noticed until I had him racing it and mentioned the engine size wrong. Had to go back and pick one car and stick with it, which meant rewriting three scenes where he's hiding evidence in the trunk. The worst part was that I had the Chevelle's trunk space mentioned pretty specifically so I had to check if a dead body would actually fit in a Trans Am's trunk. It does. Barely. But the whole thing taught me to keep a notebook with every detail written down before I start typing.