Quote:
Originally Posted by Salone
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.
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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.