Pian Pian

28 Signs that your Story Plot is Old, Predictable, etc

28 Signs that your Story Plot is Old, Predictable, Derivative, Boring, Or Cliché 

— Khayri Rednaxela Retsaoroz

1. Title begins with—or contains—the following:

- Accidentally in Love with X
- When Mr. X Meets Ms. Y
- The Long Lost X is The Y Princess
- My X is A Gangster
- That X is My Wife
- X Academy
- X University
- X High
- That X is A Supercool Geek Nerd
- X and Y (and Z)
- He's Into Q
- ILY ABC
- Diary Ng XYZ
- The G's Daughter
- The Q's Son
- The JKL Sisters
- The DEF Brothers


Excessively long titles are spoilery and boring. Give the readers a unique and short story title and let us, readers, wonder and find out why.


Other titles are just too familiar. This often happens if a writer tries to imitate the titling scheme of another—probably more popular—writer. It is not uncommon to encounter stories that not only imitates another story's title, it also copies the plot of that story as well. Stories with familiar title and titling schemes are boring and already gives off the story per se. Which, for the most part, are throwbacks of And Then There Were None or Battle Royale or The BodyGuard or The Godfather or James Bond or Weird Science or 19th century epistolary novels or Gone With The Wind.


2. The first paragraph already revealed everything about the protagonist.


As a reader, I prefer the first paragraph of the first chapter or prologue of a story to be a marketing sales talk for the whole book, not an (auto)biography of a character. There is an adage in the world of writing that never gets old: Show, do not tell. Show us the character, not tell us about him or her.


Long chapters whose sole purpose is to profile a character is boring for many readers. Not to mention, it is suffocating as well. You do not want your reader to suffocate from lengthy introductory paragraphs in Chapter One. Give us time to breath. Avoid tiring your readers' eyes with information overload.


3. The introductory scene of the story is the first day of school.


Ah, the first day of school, which usually begins in awkward misencounters of the protagonist with his/her love interest, a potential bump with some bully who would turn out to be the main character's nemesis but may possibly become the hero's bestfriend towards the end. No, we do not have superpowers to tell in advance how your story would go. It's just that we've read the same story over and over and over again. Ever heard about reader's fatigue?


4. The protagonist arrives late in the first day of school.


We get it. She gets late at school at Day 1, which angers the teacher, and all her classmates notice her and remembers her. One thing leads to another and suddenly she's stalked by crush. Also highly possible that main character got late because she had a first-hand encounter with the campus jerk who would turn out to be a good guy and the two ends up falling in love with each other, the end. Thanks for saving us the time we would have wasted in reading a book with an utterly predictable plot.  Remember this rule: familiar beginning leads to a familiar ending. And regardless if your story actually ends differently, that doesn't stop potential readers from putting your book back in the shelf when they read that kind of overused introduction.


5. The narration is infested by comic-like scenes enclosed by asterisks:

*BOGSH!*
*KRIIIIING KRIIIIING*
*SOB! SOB!*
*JUMPS TO THE CLIFF WHILE DABBING*
*PAK!*
*TSUP*
*BANG! BANG!*
*BLAM!*
*BBOOM BBOOM POW!*


Again, show, don't tell. Those SFX tags are cute, but you're writing a story. Unless you're writing a script for a comic book, a play, a film or a soap, avoid using those amateurish comicization and start practicing how to describe spontaneous events properly.


6. The story revolves around an abusive husband and a martyr (read: incredibly stupid) wife.


Nothing much to tell about this. It's self-explanatory. This kind of plot has been going on and on and on in stage plays, radio dramas, television soap operas, movies, pocketbooks, magazines, textbooks, and even song lyrics. Holding the rightful rank of being probably the most ubiquitous and overused plot since time immemorial, it's the perfect plot choice to bore readers who weren't born yesterday.


7. Uses dialog conversations like that of a script.