101 things you're tired of reading...
 

Okay, the title is being a little more polite than what goes through my head when I read some of this stuff but thought I'd put it here.

1. Woe is me!

This one makes my eye twitch. When the character utters something about their personal state and how much it sucks, usually in some hopeless, dramatic fashion, especially at the beginning of a story when we pretty much know that things are going to get fixed. Oh will this sorry state of affairs ever end? Will I ever find true happiness? Will my dog ever come back home? The character may as well hold their wrist to their forehead or throw their arm over their eyes and shout "Woe is me!"

*holds hand to chest and faints*


2. Eyeballs are orbs.

This one is just overuse. I've probably used it at some point myself. No more orbs. Really, "eyes" is just fine. Please no more orbs.

My genial spirits fail!


It's really an egregious example of amateur writers trying to sound profound when it's really just purple. Because, the choice is either just using "orbs" as in "his orbs narrowed" (WHAT?!) or adding an obnoxious descriptor like "jacinth" "cerulean" or "opalescent". *vomits*

Anyway.

3. Referring to personal combat as a "dance". Stop doing that, people. Call it a frenzy. A slaughterfall. A weighing of lives and deaths, of hopes and fatal deeds, of mercy and murder... just not a dance, I beg. :P

4. Stock phrases. Shorthand for actual imagination in prose. Please invest more energy in defining your own style instead of miming things like "quick as the wind", "razor-sharp", or especially anything as awful as "blind as a bat".

5. Descriptors appended to dialogue tags. "Said harshly", "replied sarcastically", or "quipped cheerfully", and the like. That needs to go away and never come back. Alternatives to said are fine, in moderation, "roared", "whispered", whatever, but only use them when they're really needed and try to convey the effective in a less blatant way. It's shorthand, again, for inventive writing.

6. Just... adverbs. Ever.

I don't mind that one so much, as long as there is a general awareness that it does nothing to enhance the writing. I tend to take most (keyword, "most") such phrases as more a statement of fact. So the character is blind, gotcha.


7. Capital letters where capital letters are not grammatically needed.

This is okay in moderate amounts, but when used to emphasize a word it bothers me. 'His eyes were Blue! They were so very Blue...' I can see that he has blue eyes, thank you very much. -.-

Is this a fan-fiction thing? I don't believe I've ever seen it, but it sounds nauseating. Just use italics!

8. Happy-go-lucky-murderer-heroes. If your character makes a career of cutting or blasting through vast swathes of other members of their own species, and is routinely involved in traumatic and violent situations... please ensure that these events and actions have an effect on their psyche and change them in some way.

9. Unrealistically prolonged and intricate fight scenes. People tire, especially when exerting explosive force through all their muscles over sustained periods. Also, fighting is messy. People make mistakes, everything doesn't look choreographed.

Currently trying to fix that. My writing still sort of a mess, though.

And yeah, 8 bothers me and is a thing I've been messing with for my characters.

10. Short choppy sentences. Yes, I get that they're structurally correct, but reading that makes my head hurt. It feels like everything is moving at a really fast pace. I do the short-sentences thing maybe once in a while, but usually in action scenes where the action is rapid and abrupt.

I prefer abrupt sentence fragments interwoven with more complicated sentences to emphasize a particular moment. All part of the reading rhythm.

I know the style you're talking about, it can be effective in small doses, but an entire book written that way would be maddening.

11. Description of character's appearance. I really don't care what color eyes a character has, where their oh-so-badass scar is located, and what kind of silk their doublet is stitched from. If it doesn't have some narrative relevance, I'm not interested. It's just filler and another crutch for engaging prose.

Unless the PoV character has some kind of OCD related to what people wear, I'd give that a pass for a short story, but even still, no way in a novel.

As an exercise one time, I took every character in a story of mine and changed their ethnicity, just to see what it would do. (Was watching a show that was talking about the sort of roles actors are able to get according to their ethnicity, like African Americans usually getting the roles of villains or uneducated types.) Previously, everyone was white, not out of conscious thought, but out of habit. I made one character African American, another Asian, and another Eastern European. It didn't change a bean.

12: Info dump!

I shouldn't have to say this but I still see it. Please, keep information to what's needed at the moment in time. I don't need to know a character's life history when they are first introduced. It's especially annoying when it happens during something else. I don't need to know where a character found their sword, what they named it, why, and who they already killed with it in the middle of a fight.

Managing info-dump might mean that you don't get to tell your reader everything you want to about your lovingly crafted setting or characters. It sucks sometimes, but keeping things trim really helps the writing, and there will be other moments to show off stuff.

Even if it *is* relevant at the time, do try to work it in naturally and don't just drop it in a huge wall of text talking straight to the reader. Unless your name is Jonathan Ronald Reuel. :|

13. Resurrection/cheating death. Unless it's a plot point, like, "If you kill the bodily form of the Nazgul, they'll simply fly back to Sauron and be re-endowed with earthly essence", if someone is killed... leave them dead. And pulling the ol' "Let's have Aragorn fall off a cliff, won't that be DRAMATIC?!?!?!" is a horrible idea. Unless you're writing some kind of avant-garde literary short fiction, having your character die of freak natural causes really shouldn't happen, and you shouldn't waste time trying to trick the reader into thinking it did, only so you can say "Gotcha!" ten pages later. Unless your name is John Ronald Reuel. :P

14: "Blood red"

I have no actual objections to something being described as blood red, so long as what we are looking at is actually that colour and not just red. I've seen blood often enough to have a fair idea of it's colour, and it shifts, and no, it's usually not that red unless it's a thin layer smeared on something. Seriously, a tomato isn't red like blood. It's red like a tomato. Please don't use such descriptions for colour unless it's actually the right colour.

I'd also like to know where people go the idea that "ginger" means red, too (talking about colour here, not references to red-headed people). What about ginger is red? I've never seen red ginger before. Ginger root is brown and pickled ginger is often pinkish. What's the deal?



On the capitals thing: I've seen it around, but more often in amateur fiction then published fiction but I've seen it there too. It's just irritating to me.

If I may jump in this thread, I think it comes from the colour of red-headed people. The actual ginger you cook with doesn't have a lot of red hues in it, so I'm not sure what else it could be.

15. Unnecessary Violence.
I see this in a lot of books nowadays, and maybe some fanfiction. Sometimes a character will simply smash a hole in a wall to get his point across. I understand the character is needlessly violent, and that can be a great character point, but doing so five times in a row lessens the impact of violence. (I suppose unnecessary romance can go with this.)

Violence and romance are like spices; use sparingly!

*cough* Peter Jackson *cough*

16. Shallow and weak portrayals of female characters. This is really pretty simple, I don't know why so many writers struggle with it.

A. Female characters are not prizes for male characters to win.

B. Female characters have lives and interests beyond being inanely in love with your protagonist,or romance in general.

C. To make a female character cool and enjoyable to read about, she doesn't need to be a man on the inside. You *can* have a badass female warrior or two, but give a fair amount of thought to what makes them tick, and keep in mind the characters (of any gender) don't need to be murdering monsters on the battlefield to be strong.

D. Actually, as a rule, just... don't identify your characters by their gender so much as their motivations, personalities, experiences, social status, religious beliefs or lack thereof, or any number of other more interesting, complex, and fulfilling psychological perspectives.


(What Suze really means is don't Twilight your female Characters. -Nexy)

D: but what if my female is a stock based off a stereotype of a real female generalization!

So XD I am not sure if I am allowed to add to this list, if not I can delete it but …

17: “Olive Skin ”

It is actually one of my biggest pet peeves when describing an ethic character of the Mediterranean origin or tanned skin individuals. I know that food descriptions can be overused in general especially when describing African Americans but this one is particularly bothersome. Unless the person is sickly and dying or as black as an actual olive (Which I have not met a person with a slimy green twinge in their skin.) It shouldn’t be used. Especially given the rich adjectives that neutral tones can be called.

Of course you're allowed to, Pog. :)

And that's a really good one, it has some unfortunate implications, and should really have every attempt made to eliminate it.

18. Breaking perspective

This is one of my personal gripes, it might not apply to everyone's taste. Essentially, when you're writing from a character's perspective, you don't give details that are outside their perception, and you don't have them talk to the audience with their thoughts. Unless they have some reason to cogitate upon their own remarkably oh-so-beautiful blue eyes like azure sapphirean orbs upon the sea kissed by a balmy sunrise... spare the audience the mention of them. It breaks suspension of disbelief, among other sins...

I struggled with "olive skin" for the longest time ever. I think it's supposed to be like...tan? From what I remember, "olive" is referring to the gold-ness that some olives can have (not all olives are green/black), and it includes such a broad range that I really don't know what authors are describing when they use that term.

"Olive" does seem to be some means of referring to people in a non-white/black/Asian fashion. Pog probably has it right with Mediterranean. I think it is supposed to lean towards tan-ish, but it's probably one of those things where someone liked the word and used it, and then someone else thought it worked and used it, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if it's getting to the point where it's becoming the standard word to use just like "black' or "white" even though, technically speaking, they could be just as inaccurate, colour-wise.


To expand on what Suze said, another thing that gets to me is when authors appear to forget that their characters are not reading what is happening, so say things that don't make sense verbally, such as when comparing the spelling of word without having the character sound it out letter by letter. I've only seen it a couple of times, so not sick of it, but it does come off as odd.

19. Cell phone Speak.
U R GR8! USE YOUR WORDS PEOPLE... I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir. I could say more, but do I need to?

*Looks through* *Realizes I am not sure how many things I do/do not trip over in writing*
...Overuse of Symbolism. I am tired of extreme emphasis on symbolism, to the point of distracting from the actual story. To me, symbolism should be more akin to the "easter eggs" you find in a game that unlock the "true" ending.
Symbolism is often iffy, because the meaning of symbols changes over time, and people's mindsets/experiences interpret them differently. A train down the tunnel - entering purgatory, sex, factual information, or what?

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...Hopeless stories/"Cathartic" stories - The sort of story where the main character is forced into a "deterministic" doom in the end or where everything is pointless rubs me very wrong. I don't really understand how reading about another suffering makes you feel better or "released/refreshed" - catharsis.
In truth, I never really consider such stories finished. Things don't just "end" with tragedy in real life, and I see this ending as more a repetitive frustrating cliffhanger.

21. Reading a longer post typed entirely in lower case.

Saying so might make me a jerk. But upper case makes it easier to separate sentences and break down all the information so I can understand you. This is why it bothers me. Plain and simple.

22. Seeing the exact same event from different third person perspectives.

This one doesn't come up a whole lot, but there is a certain book series that turned me off because of this. While sure, it describes the event for each character, the reader is forced to read through the same events over and over. It's even worse when it goes on to describe the physical event again and again. The biggest offender I've seen had a record-setting six different viewpoints on the same thing. And it just repeated itself with each new event.

While it's accurate for your characters, please insert me in to the story at the point that is after the event has happened but before they have responded to it. It's like watching a youtube video repeat in slow motion 6 times every time.

This isn't what I wanted, book. This isn't what I wanted at all.

I've read a book that did that fairly well, but the character where separated enough that, although they were visiting the same locations and sometimes saw the same thing happen, it was fairly different each time because of time separation or other information a person had that made it different enough that it didn't feel like the same scene on repeat from a different angle.

See, the big offender was a war fiction series. My first mistake was buying the first three without reading the first one, well...first.

The gist of it goes that a few modern aircraft carriers are part of a program to test teleportation. Instead of moving though, they go through time and wind up popping in to WW2. So I'm expecting fun stuff with the implication of modern technology used in brutal ways and Nazi helicopters and maybe Soviets on the moon and stuff. Oh no, no no no.

In the first real scene, one of the aircraft carriers warps in to the same spot currently occupied by an American battleship. So the ships are fused together, body parts just end at walls, things like that. Unfortunately there are about 6 'main characters' at this point, all mixed from different time periods. Unfortunately, I have to see the exact same event from all of their points. It's like every year in history, you were taught about the nomadic tribes crossing the land bridge in to North America. I get it. Let's move on. A ship appeared. Do not tell me six times. Unfortunately, the book continuously abuses this mechanic. I could not make it through it.

23. "Cool (insert monetary amount here)"

Didn't used to bother me, but in the past week almost every time I've come across some statement or other about how much money a person made or paid for something, the word "cool" needs to be stuck in front of it. It's getting to the point where it's not just a knee-jerk "ugh." I want to punt something.

Can I get an excerpt Quiet man? It just sounds so weird when I try to read it my head.

"Slim McJones wasn't sure if he was okay with what he had done. However, a cool fifty bucks in his pocket bought his silence like a new muffler. Besides, how could he talk while his mouth was busy drowning his sorrows in a cool fifty bucks worth of cheap domestic beer?"

Along the lines of things like that. I know what Quiet is talking about. It has extremely saturated the crime/mystery genres.

Maybe if one said "olive bark", rather than just 'olive', the color thing would be more relevant? Skin-like barks and bark-like skins...

This works better in television or movies, not books.

I actually saw a hilarious television episode who used this with great effect...
The first perspective you watched showed a rather hilarious disaster of a party complete with the hosts throwing expensive food on the floor and the guests fleeing the house due to a fire and an insect infestation. The later perspectives each added one piece to the puzzle of WHY that happened (which turned the craziness into logical events), and showed events occurring simultaneously to the others from different rooms, with some artful overlap to tie it all together. As a result, it was several different stories that happened to overlap with dire consequences. THAT worked, and the results were absolutely hilarious.
But the thought of reading the same situations, instead of watching them occur over a half-hour television show...? NO WAY. It wouldn't flow as well. That's too much juggling of information.



As for things that drive me nuts when reading?

24. Changes of tense within the same paragraph (unless it makes sense, like someone doing one thing while remembering another). It doesn't flow well if the events are on the same timeline, and actually makes things sound choppy.

25. Misuse/overuse of pronouns because it gets really confusing to try and keep track of things.
If there are many people of the same gender talking to each other, there has to be some way to differentiate which one is which, if it matters. If it doesn't matter (or you're trying to accentuate confusion in, say, a barfight or something), you don't have to use pronouns at all.
Likewise, the misuse of "they" makes me think there are at least two people involved, and I get lost looking for the non-existent person I missed, rather than paying attention to the story.

I can excuse a few errors, since I know from experience it's really easy to miss simple errors and to have other people miss them. It is jarring though, and sort of reminds me that I'm reading a story that came from someone's head. It breaks the immersion, so to speak.

27. "Bwa-ha-ha" villains. I'm sick and tired of them. There are way too many of them, they're cliche, don't you think? Why can't there be different kinds of villains? Why not the "unwilling" kind or "festered mind" kind? Those aren't so bad, are they?

28. The really cheesy basic romance novels, like Twilight. Gah it's like reading the same book, over and over again.

I think it's more that the concept of "villains" in general has become stale. They're the artifact of a simpler, more archetypal type of storytelling that our postmodern sensibilities have largely moved past, as a society. It is absolutely possible for a story to have an antagonist without that antagonist falling into some sort of exaggerated caricature of a human being for the sake of making them easily-identifiable as the "bad guy". Readers deserve a little more credit than that, we can understand complex personal motivations. (Almost) no one in real life is "evil"; people who do terrible things have desires and beliefs that lead them to feel that they should or must hurt others in order to achieve their goals. While a worldview like that isn't something most readers will respect or agree with, it's one that can be understood, which turns the "villain" from a two-dimensional plot device into an actual person that the reader can experience on a human level. In my view, that makes for far more compelling fiction.

...surprised I never gave that particular rant before in this thread. Oh well.

29. "Relatable" Characters

I think I may be in the minority on this one, but I do not understand the need to be able to identify or empathize with a protagonist or any other character in a work of fiction. Maybe there's something wrong with my concept of escapism, but I'm generally not thinking about myself at all when I'm reading. Whether *I* personally would like a character in fiction is an absurdly meaningless proposition to me. I care if they're interesting to read about, that's pretty much it.

As an aside, audience-proxy characters need to go die in a fire. I'll flounder about in new fictional worlds all on my own, thank you; I don't need a doltish dunce of a protagonist asking idiotic questions at every turn for me to figure things out. Give me characters who've actually lived in the world they inhabit, kthxbai.

Well you gave that rant now...

I think the idea of calling a character "relatable" is assuming a lot of your readership. I'm sure there will always be people out there who don't relate.

31. Ill-Defined Actions

Err...I do. I would prefer actions to be described over scenery, though. I have to be able to visualize something to understand it well, so when someone says "whirled" rather than "turned 180 degrees" I can mess it up in my view of the event. This has contributed to several misunderstood words in my youth, to be honest, so yes, it is a pet peeve when a term for an action is not defined enough.

32. Word Overuse

Sometimes I feel like an author finds out about a word while writing a book and likes it so much that they insert it whenever they can. A good example is Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth. Fairly short story, but read it and tell me how many times 'furtive' pops up. R.R. Martin is another guilty party, as he comes across words and phrases and is so excited to use them that he uses them way too freaking much. It's as if he thinks each time he uses them, they'll take a pound away. Variety is the spice of life, but a lot of authors find that they really enjoy Lemon Pepper and end up saturating their work with it when in fact, the reader also enjoys parsley and rosemary with a dash of thyme.

Maybe because you warned me about it I did't really think it was used all that much. I've seen worse, especially with phrases. I suppose I take it as a point of style with Lovecraft, since he did the same thing with "aeon(suffix)" in At The Mountains of Madness.

A year and a half later...

This is people thinking they can write Rashomon, while being oblivious to the fact that Rashomon's effectiveness was entirely based on exploring the limits of each person's perspective and then FOLLOWING THROUGH WITH IT to explore how that influences how the events are interpreted.

There's a pretty good chance that the authors in question may not even be aware of Rashomon and just heard about it having been done and thought "that's a great idea, let me try!"

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BTW, adverbs are great. And Tom Swifties are just lazy, not DIAF-level. Occasional use, especially if the adverb in question actually says something relevant about the description, isn't a bad thing.

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I've seen the capital letters thing before. It's not just fanfiction; I think it hearkens back to the religious use of capitalized "His", marking a particular (usually common) word as possessing some sort of marked quality. The example of "Blue" would therefore not be saying "they're very blue" but "they are the specific quality of blue that means the person belongs to group X / is an avatar of X / etc." Kind of a proper noun, in adjective form.

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"Relatable" characters: I think most of your gripe comes from a lot of writers misunderstanding what "relatable" actually means in writing advice (and then making more writing advice based around that misunderstanding). It doesn't mean that the reader should feel an empathic connection to the character. It means that the reader should be able to form a mental model about the character that aligns with how real people think and act. Said another way, it's not that the character should think in a way that resonates with the reader emotionally; it's that the reader ought to be able to imagine being in the character's position, with the character's knowledge, with the character's personality, and from that context have the character's decisions make sense.

If you violate this rule on purpose, that makes the character seem alien and incomprehensible. If you violate this rule by accident, that makes the character seem flat or stupid or confusing.

It just happens to be the case that novice writers tend to have an easier time writing relatable characters that also have empathetic resonance.

I can understand that, but in the case above there was nothing else to hint that there was anything special or significant about that particular shade of "Blue." If there was meaning there outside emphasizing a colour, or why it was emphasized, the author didn't share.

chars who are, undoubtedly, the very [I]best[I] at something that they've never put any actual work into. there is something really lazy about the five-star 'prodigy' who is 18 years or so old, has never practiced their 'talent' seriously a day in their life and yet is unequivocally better than thousands or millions of other people who have spent decades of their lives studying/practicing/honing the same talent and nary a soul challenges this claim excepting a single middle-aged man(who is trounced terribly) and/or the villain(who is trounced much worse)

You mean like how Harry Potter got all the glory because of something that happened to him as a baby, while Hermione Granger was by far the better magic user?