As a writing teacher, I’ve noticed that the same mistakes often pop up in emerging writers’ work; a persistent mistake by writers of fiction is a tendency to avoid allowing a work’s conflict to fully emerge. This is something I’ve noticed in my own writing, too. After all, it’s awkward and uncomfortable to force characters we’ve created and come to love to really get into it with each other, and so we keep putting the real conflict off, until the short story or novel becomes a series of deflections.