18 Common Mistakes Tagalog Romance Writers Make

1. Too many side characters. It confuses readers.
2. Unique but weird names of characters. 
3. Biography-ish story (focused only on one character's life). 
4. Unique but ludicrous, contrived or unrealistic plot.
5. Overused plot without new twists. Scenes are cliche.  
6. An unhappy ending.
7. Conflict is all 'internal' (e.g. heroine is afraid to fall in love and that's only the problem in the story). 
8. Juvenile characters. 
9. Inaccurate research.
10. Writing down a lot of details, bombarding readers with too much information that has no direct relevance to the story.
11. Giving out too little information about characters that readers find it hard to relate to them. 
12. Loooong narratives, making the story dragging to read.
13. Using two or more POVs (point of view) in one scene. It's confusing because Tagalog does not have gender for pronouns. 
14. No justification for some of characters' actions. 
15. Adding unrealistic dialogues.
16. Adding scenes that will not push the story forward. 
17. Not enough scenes to SHOW how and why the characters fell in love with each other.
18. No self-editing, resulting to too many grammatical/spelling errors* and unresolved loopholes. 

*Note: I might write another blog entry about the common grammatical/spelling mistakes writers make later. :)