Continuing with the fiction ailments/fixes idea, I’m always surprised at how many possible pitfalls a novelist can get stuck in.
Writing Tip for Today: If you’re drafting your first novel, maybe you’re surprised too. So many things can go wrong. The novels you’ve read didn’t seem this complicated. Ah, but there’s the rub. Good novels keep these bones hidden so the reader enjoys that vivid and continual dream.

• Stakes Right Through the Heart. We discussed before how if the main character’s stakes (what he has to lose) are too low, the So What factor kicks in. Try this for a fix: Ask yourself what the consequences will be if your character fails to overcome X and attain the goal you’ve set. If the answer is not earthshaking in some way, you may need to put more on the line. No fair saying the world will blow up. It’s been done.
• The Educational Novel. While most fictioneers will tell you they just want readers to enjoy their work, some have an agenda. Whether that agenda is to educate, proselytize or persuade the reader, most of the time the story suffers as a result. Two ways to spot this problem:  blocks of narrative which tell the reader all about it, and dialogue that’s loaded with information a real character would never say.
• Middle Sag. Toward the mid-point of your story, the tendency is for the action to slow down and sometimes grind to a halt. Identify and remedy scenes which do not get the character moving toward the story goal, places where a subplot(s) takes over, or where supporting characters steal the show. The middle of a novel must be as exciting as the beginning and the end.
• Too Many Chiefs. If you spread out the reader’s sympathies by making several characters carry the main story line, you end up with no reader sympathy at all. The story can be told from more than one viewpoint, but the reader needs to understand whose story it is.
• Too Many, Period. Some writers have a flair for inventing quirky minor characters with fun, original names. If the main character interacts with so many named characters that readers can’t remember them all, consider this: My rule is that if a character has no speaking parts, that character doesn’t get named. And remember to introduce characters one or two at a time, to give readers a chance to firmly remember each one.