Immersive Writing Mistakes

Immersive writing is the art of keeping your reader "in" the story. But there are many ways that you can accidentally break the immersion and throw the reader "out." Once this happens, it's often very hard to win your reader back.

There are many types of non-immersive writing mistakes, but the main ones tend to be: 1. Reminding the reader that you exist. 2. Reminding the reader it's a book. 3. Speedbumps that stop a reader zooming through the story.

As a writer, you need to disappear in a puff of grammar. Don't show yourself. Hide your ego. It's a hard trick to do. Have you ever heard the editor's saying of "kill your darlings"? Most of these cases are where the author has tried too hard to write something great, and the author has become too visible. It's also called "author intrusion" or "heavy-handed writing" if you want to search it up some more.

The second point is to hide that it's a book. This sounds really silly at first. How can you hide the book-like nature of your novel, while still having your reader flip through the pages? But it's really true, because when a reader gets deeply "into" your story, they forget that they're reading words, they forget about anything else than what's going to happen next. So you need to aid and abet their self-deception that it's not a book at all.

The third point is that speedbumps stop the reader from reading your entire book in a couple of hours. It takes you months to write, but you want them to spend as little time as possible reading it, if your genre is one that needs immersive storytelling. There are various ways that a reader can get jolted by a grammatical speedbump that reminds them it's only a book.

The Big Mistakes

What causes an editor to put down a manuscript? It's often the big things.

1. Why should I read this? There's nothing inspiring, unique, or different.
2. Conflict underload. Nothing exciting happening in the plot.
3. Predictable situations and scenes. I've "scene" this before in another book.
4. Boring characters. Uninspiring or insipid characters. Maybe they're too nice, too mean, too one-dimensional, or lacking in goals.
5. Boring dialogue. Snappy dialogue and witty banter is hard to write, but it works.
6. Boring setting. The setting seems to be a white-walled room or the same cafe a dozen times.

Medium-Sized Mistakes in Immersive Writing

If you've done well with plot, characters, and setting, here's a longer list of some of the many possible large, chunky mistakes:

1. Too much backstory. There is nothing that is "in the moment" about backstory. Consider avoiding it completely. Have important little facts reveal themselves gradually as a kind of drip-feed to the reader. Don't say too much in the descriptions of setting or character backgrounds, and don't fall into the trap of trying to have it all show up in the dialogue either. Find creative ways to embed it seamlessly.
2. Too many flashbacks. Or similarly, over-long flashbacks. Similar to backstory, the flashback can destroy the moment.
3. Author intrusion. This refers to a variety of writing sins whereby the reader is forced to notice that there's an author. (Read more about author intrusion.) True immersive writing completely ignores the author. In no way should you highlight that you exist. There are various ways that authors tend to break this rule, mostly under the category of "showing off with words." All of the literary devices your English teacher told you about can be non-immersive if overdone: alliteration, metaphor, simile, rhyme, rhythm, etc. They all can force the reader to notice the writing instead of the story.
4. Breaking the Fourth Wall. This is a stage concept where the actors can't talk directly to the audience, but have to pretend there's an imaginary fourth wall between the audience and the action. So immersive writing is similar, in that you can't talk to the reader. Some books do it intentionally with a narrative style that says things to the audeience, such as "Dear Reader, I know what you must be thinking..." or other weird stuff. That's not an immersively written book, although it's a style that works in various good literary works.
5. Too long introspective paragraphs. An important aspect of immersive stories is hearing the thoughts of your main POV character. But you also cannot overdo it. If the character thinks too long about something, it becomes less immersive. People don't tend to have long and detailed thoughts in the middle of a conversation. Even a paragraph of "emotional reaction beat" at the end of a conversation is often too much.
6. Over-describing setting. You do need an intricate and well-described setting for an immersive story. But if you dump a whole load of detailed descriptions of layouts on the reader too early, you might never draw them in. Aim to have the details of the setting gradually reveal themselves in the background of the main story, which is action affecting the main character.
7. Over-describing characters. You don't start off with a paragraph about the character's hair tone and eye color. You can't have your main viewpoint character have long thoughts about some other character, because that's not really how people think. People don't think these kind of thoughts about other people that they already know. Find seamless ways to sneak character attributes into the story.
8. Over-explaining something. Sometimes you need to explain some technical aspect of a story, whether it's a magic system or a medical case. But you need to take care with this, lest it become your character "explaining to themself" or it starts to feel like the character is lecturing the reader. The narrative is supposed to be the idle in-the-moment thoughts of the POV character, and we humans simply don't sit there thinking about something for a couple of paragraphs. Make it short and to the point. Or if you really need to explain it, you can convert some of it into dialogue, or gradually eke out the explanation over a bigger section (with intervening action).
9. Don't over-push the emotions. Emotions need to build naturally and in an understated way. If you try to cram emotions down the reader's throat, well, you get the opposite reaction, and readers will notice. You need to "show" the cause of the emotions and "show" how your character reacts, rather than telling the reader about what emotion your character is feeling. It's a hard thing to do well.
10. Don't mention boredom. If you talk about your character getting bored, how do you expect your reader will feel?
11. Don't "suddenly" have something happen. Readers hate coincidences (for some reason), and "suddenly" sounds a lot like a coincidence. Tweak your plot so that happenings occur more naturally with a reason, or as the consequence of a character's action.
12. Don't mention the words! For you, sitting in front of your laptop, it's all about words. But you can't let them into the story. In immersive writing, it's almost like there's no words. When your reader is "in" the book, the story goes straight from the page to the reader's synapses. So don't highlight that there are words by saying things like "happy wasn't the right word for it" or "she was sad beyond words."

Smaller Immersive Writing Mistakes

There are some technical aspects that you might want to avoid in immersive writing, because they can remind the reader about the book.

1. Bad spelling. Typos are an immersion killer. Proofread, proofread, proofread! Usually you can easily find the misspelled (misspelt?) words with your word processor. But watch out for American versus British spelling, and repeated words are a common failure.
2. Bad punctuation. Learn the correct way to punctuate dialogue, with the comma inside the closing double quote.
3. Avoid single quotes. The American style is to have double quotes for everything. The only time you use single quotes is when it's a quote inside someone's dialogue, so it's a single-quoted word or two that's inside a pair of double quotes.
4. Avoid em dashes. Personally I hate these sentences where an extra clause is inserted between a pair of em dashes. Readers tend to have to go back and re-read the sentence a couple of times, which breaks their zoom. Yes, it's fancy, but use sparingly.
5. Avoid semicolons. Writers often like semicolons, but to readers, they are advanced punctuation and a little confusing. Is it a short break like a comma, or has the sentence ended? Use them sparingly, by which I mean only a dozen or so per fifty thousand words.
6. Too many commas. There are many commas in every novel, but try not to bunch them all up into the same sentence. If your sentence has more than a comma or two, it probably should be two sentences.
7. Sentences starting with "anyway". The word "anyway" is a big speedbump. It kind of says, stop here, and look around. Even worse are sentence starters like "anyhow" or "however."
8. Overdone dialogue tags. Readers tend to notice weird dialogue verb tags like "I contradicted" or "I interpolated," but the basic tags are almost invisible to readers ("I said" / "I replied" / "I added"). The word "said" (in past tense), or "say"/"says" (in present tense), should be 50% or more of your tags.
9. Long paragraphs. The aim for an "easy reading" book that reader's stay inside is a series of short bite-sized paragraphs. If all your paragraphs are a few sentences, and then suddenly you throw in a longer paragraph, it can throw the reader off.
10. Don't mention the words. Your character is unaware that they are writing a story. They are living it, not writing it. So your POV character cannot complain "I just can't find the right word," or say "not to put too fine a point on it," or "the long and the short of it" or similar things. It's easy to forget that you are trying to pretend there's not a book here. If you accidentally remind the reader, it's like breaking the fourth wall.
11. Be careful of self-referencing verbs. This is an advanced idea, but having your character's viewpoint as "I saw", "I noticed", "I realized", or similar verbs, is actually non-immersive. It reminds the reader that the character is telling the story, which inserts them in between the reader and the story. For example, instead of writing "I noticed a svelte cat sitting on the doorstop," you might instead write: "The svelte cat on the doorstop licked its paw." Notice how there's no "I" in the improved version (but it's still not very good, because who's cat is it?). An exception to this quirky rule is that writing "I said" as a dialogue tag is almost invisible to readers.
12. Use contractions. It sounds pompous, stilted, and unrealistic if your character says "I am going to the store" in dialogue. Say it out loud to hear it if you need to. The need for contractions is also true in exposition, because the narrative exposition is the thoughts of the POV character, which should also be informal. You have to change all the "I am" to "I'm", all the "did not" to "didn't", and so on. If it's genre fiction and you want it to be immersive, almost all the contractions have to be gone from both dialogue and non-dialogue. You can allow more contractions in non-fiction or less immersive literary fiction.
13. Avoid editor peeve words. There are a number of words that editors dislike (for good reason), such as: actually, literally, got/gotten, and many more.