I was reading a general-audience history book last week, and found myself shouting at the book every time the author described the smell of the air or the glint in someone’s eyes. You weren’t there, man! Don’t pretend you were there! At one point, he described everything some guy passed on this one walk in 1920s Chicago, and at first I thought, well, maybe this guy kept a really intense diary. But then the guy in question was shot dead.
Do not give me details that do nothing to forward the plot, aren’t indicative of character, and are not beautifully written. Example from a book I was reading: two tense people pull up to a police station. Then: “He unbuckled his seatbelt.” The book doesn’t seem more “real” by bland writing flat details of living. Then: “He opened the door.”
No! Now I’m vaguely wondering whether seatbelts are part of the plot (answer is no) and worried that all these details (which would be in the stage directions, I guess, if this were a play) are going to continue. He raised the sandwich to his mouth. He took a bite. I shut the book.
it would be more interesting if he tried to get out and DID NOT unbuckle his seat belt. That stuff drives me crazy: He spread the jelly on top of the peanut butter and then placed the other piece of bread on top of that ...
Descriptions of eye color. Unless someone has an especially unusual eye color, I cannot tell you the color of anyone’s eyes except my family members and that is because my kids want to know why they didn’t get green eyes like me. I tried y’all.
It really grinds me when an author (a published author!) resorts to the old info dump trick ... unable to find an artful way to get in a physical description of a character, the first-person narrator instead glances in a mirror where she sees "a woman too thin for classic beauty but with a generous and expressive mouth and unruly dark hair carelessly tied back in a low ponytail ..." Please, have another character instead speak up and say, "You know, you really are too thin for classic beauty ..." As if.
I once read (and then promptly abandoned) a book where the main character was walking to her job with her mom, and her mom info-dump described the main character's own job to her. "As a baker, you sure do have to get up early in the morning in order to get the loaves of bread mixed and rising. Plus you have to remember to feed the sourdough starter."
Although I’ve seen it in the work of excellent writers, I always raise both eyebrows when a writer describes a character as “lifting a brow.” My riding instructor is the only person I know who can lift one brow independently of the other. She does this frequently to stress the importance of independent aids in riding and to suggest how far I am from teaching one part of my body to move independently of the rest.
Heavy-handed tip offs. I read a friend's first novel (I wanted it so bad to be good, but it just wasn't) and before his spy heroine is going to meet her Nazi handler (she's a double agent), he makes sure we know she sticks a hat pin in her hair as she leaves the restaurant. Guess what she stabs the villainous SS officer in the neck with? My friend was so proud of that murder scene, sure it came as a complete surprise to the reader. I didn't have the heart to use it as an example of hamhandedness. The time to mention hatpins was when she was shopping for a new hat in chapter two, and thinking about the man she's in love with, distractedly pricks her own scalp. By Chapter 34, that would be long forgotten, but the writer can't be accused of introducing something completely out of thin air, which was his fear.
I did give him one bit or macro-advice, but it didn't stick (a-hem): Don't answer questions the reader isn't asking.
Good point. One lesson learned: Never propose to a close friend who's looking for something to do in retirement to novelize your screenplay, particularly when you're making assumptions about his writing skills based on his exquisite library and years of well-wrought letters and emails. (His first, sample chapter was quite good, but he followed the screenplay closely -- and that had been rewritten 100 times.) You could jeopardize a friendship of 40 years over it.
this one is probably common knowledge at this point but "[x] let out a breath they didn't know they were holding." not as common in literary fiction as in commercial/romance but it crops up occasionally and makes me crazy!
in the same vein, a smile "that doesn't reach her eyes." Geez - it's in every book I read. I think Tara Banks started it with her "smilez" made-up word.
Great thread! In no particular order: When characters do stupid and/or illogical things to advance the plot. When one phone call would solve absolutely everything. When first person narrators don’t reveal crucial information when they would most definitely be thinking it at the time.
Yes - this! There was an early 2000s blockbuster mystery that never would have gotten beyond chapter 1 had the assassin just completed his job. I couldn’t read any further because of that.
The precise sentence, '[character] shook [his/her] head as if to clear it.'
Shows up in different books in different genres and I have no idea what it's supposed to signify.
This goes into the bigger problem that a lot of these gesture-based pet peeves speak to (which I don't claim to have solved), ie, that a writer wants to break up the dialogue for pacing/rhythm purposes and resorts to blocking/stage directions, when the answer to 'what should go in this space' is usually 'something besides blocking or stage directions'
For me, it’s head jumping. Do we really need eight POV characters to tell this story? Can you please let me get attached to one before you leap to an entirely new person/continent/century and my empathy has to start growing all over again? Drives me bonkers.
There's definitely a time and place for that, but i've been thinking of this lately as "knee jerk polyphony" -- when writers are drafting and things aren't quite working and they think they can save it by adding one more voice, then one more voice... until every time they realize some character has "a story of their own to tell" (I mean, who doesn't??) they feel compelled to give them their own voice.
I love it. “Knee-jerk Polyphony” sums it up exactly. I think I’m harder on this tendency than most readers, but personally, I attach deeply to the initial protagonist’s POV, so sudden shifts feel very jarring.
- References to characters "swallowing" before speaking, eg: "Bob swallowed. 'I think you need to leave,' he said."
- When characters speak in too-articulate paragraphs in ways that no one actually talks, though I'll give this one a pass if the dialogue is interesting enough
Fair point, sometimes this sort of thing can be really delightful to read! I guess I should amend my peeve to be when it's done a little too ham handedly.
Yeah, if anything, it needs to be intentional. So it can be like: this is a hilarious romp with the kind of erudite madcap vibe that's going on, and that makes total sense for this book and these characters, and that's fun. Or it might be: oh I get it, author, you have Ideas and know big words, and then that's more of a slog.
It's kind of already there. There was a favorite sweet puff pastry at Versailles called a whore fart (pet de putain). Basically a beignet. It's in the prologue, for obvious reasons.
You have put your finger on one of my big ones. Also cadence is important to me. I love Louise Penny but the consistency and predictability of her sentence cadence has stopped me from continuing to read her stuff.
A pet peeve I only recently realized is teenage characters who sound like adults. This feels unfairly judge-y, because I'm sure writing in a teenage voice is difficult, but in my current read a 17-year-old's internal dialogue says something like "it was frustrating, like scratching your rental car on the way to return it." What do 17-year-olds know about rental cars?!
I love this question (I actually wrote a post about my literary red flags recently and it was deeply fun to air out my grievances: https://wendyrobinson.substack.com/p/literary-red-flags). I have a special distaste for authors who use the phrase "ground out" as in "What are you doing?", Bob ground out in irritation.
No! This is how you end up with expensive dental work! Save your characters molars!
Do not give me details that do nothing to forward the plot, aren’t indicative of character, and are not beautifully written. Example from a book I was reading: two tense people pull up to a police station. Then: “He unbuckled his seatbelt.” The book doesn’t seem more “real” by bland writing flat details of living. Then: “He opened the door.”
No! Now I’m vaguely wondering whether seatbelts are part of the plot (answer is no) and worried that all these details (which would be in the stage directions, I guess, if this were a play) are going to continue. He raised the sandwich to his mouth. He took a bite. I shut the book.
it would be more interesting if he tried to get out and DID NOT unbuckle his seat belt. That stuff drives me crazy: He spread the jelly on top of the peanut butter and then placed the other piece of bread on top of that ...
I call this stuff "walking around" - she went down the path, took out her keys, and opened the car door. ACK!
Exactly! (She typed out the word on her iPhone and then pressed “send.”)
AMEN! I wrote down this one four-letter word and pressed "POST." Then, it was up to the gods
"He raised the sandwich to his mouth. He took a bite. I shut the book." LOL. Beautiful.
Descriptions of eye color. Unless someone has an especially unusual eye color, I cannot tell you the color of anyone’s eyes except my family members and that is because my kids want to know why they didn’t get green eyes like me. I tried y’all.
Same! And I also have green eyes, and a) no one ever notices, why should they? and b) green eyes are rare, and yet somehow 60% of fictional white characters are given green eyes. I'm always recommending this blog post to my students: http://siangriffiths.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-green-eyes-are-problem-in-fiction.html
By we, green eyed authors with three green eyed sons who declines to write about big dogs with doleful brown eyes.
This! I hardly even notice the eye color of the men I date. Typing that makes me sound callous but I do think it's easily overlooked in real life.
It really grinds me when an author (a published author!) resorts to the old info dump trick ... unable to find an artful way to get in a physical description of a character, the first-person narrator instead glances in a mirror where she sees "a woman too thin for classic beauty but with a generous and expressive mouth and unruly dark hair carelessly tied back in a low ponytail ..." Please, have another character instead speak up and say, "You know, you really are too thin for classic beauty ..." As if.
I once read (and then promptly abandoned) a book where the main character was walking to her job with her mom, and her mom info-dump described the main character's own job to her. "As a baker, you sure do have to get up early in the morning in order to get the loaves of bread mixed and rising. Plus you have to remember to feed the sourdough starter."
Lol
Although I’ve seen it in the work of excellent writers, I always raise both eyebrows when a writer describes a character as “lifting a brow.” My riding instructor is the only person I know who can lift one brow independently of the other. She does this frequently to stress the importance of independent aids in riding and to suggest how far I am from teaching one part of my body to move independently of the rest.
I always -think- I can raise one brow, but what I'm really doing is lowering the other brow.
You have to train to do it. One of my teenage sons did it, for a whole summer!
I am enjoying this thread, she thought absentmindedly.
Heavy-handed tip offs. I read a friend's first novel (I wanted it so bad to be good, but it just wasn't) and before his spy heroine is going to meet her Nazi handler (she's a double agent), he makes sure we know she sticks a hat pin in her hair as she leaves the restaurant. Guess what she stabs the villainous SS officer in the neck with? My friend was so proud of that murder scene, sure it came as a complete surprise to the reader. I didn't have the heart to use it as an example of hamhandedness. The time to mention hatpins was when she was shopping for a new hat in chapter two, and thinking about the man she's in love with, distractedly pricks her own scalp. By Chapter 34, that would be long forgotten, but the writer can't be accused of introducing something completely out of thin air, which was his fear.
I did give him one bit or macro-advice, but it didn't stick (a-hem): Don't answer questions the reader isn't asking.
And, unless she's a surgeon too, it wouldn't kill him.
Good point. One lesson learned: Never propose to a close friend who's looking for something to do in retirement to novelize your screenplay, particularly when you're making assumptions about his writing skills based on his exquisite library and years of well-wrought letters and emails. (His first, sample chapter was quite good, but he followed the screenplay closely -- and that had been rewritten 100 times.) You could jeopardize a friendship of 40 years over it.
Funny stuff Mark!
this one is probably common knowledge at this point but "[x] let out a breath they didn't know they were holding." not as common in literary fiction as in commercial/romance but it crops up occasionally and makes me crazy!
in the same vein, a smile "that doesn't reach her eyes." Geez - it's in every book I read. I think Tara Banks started it with her "smilez" made-up word.
Yes! And all the detailed and presumably real information people get by glances and looking into eyes... Not how communication works in my experience.
Just finished a book where I counted 5 instances of this! Also a pet peeve of mine.
Great thread! In no particular order: When characters do stupid and/or illogical things to advance the plot. When one phone call would solve absolutely everything. When first person narrators don’t reveal crucial information when they would most definitely be thinking it at the time.
Yes - this! There was an early 2000s blockbuster mystery that never would have gotten beyond chapter 1 had the assassin just completed his job. I couldn’t read any further because of that.
The precise sentence, '[character] shook [his/her] head as if to clear it.'
Shows up in different books in different genres and I have no idea what it's supposed to signify.
This goes into the bigger problem that a lot of these gesture-based pet peeves speak to (which I don't claim to have solved), ie, that a writer wants to break up the dialogue for pacing/rhythm purposes and resorts to blocking/stage directions, when the answer to 'what should go in this space' is usually 'something besides blocking or stage directions'
He gazed at her for a long moment.
I almost put that! - I just finished a Sci fi series that has 'long moments' all over it.
For me, it’s head jumping. Do we really need eight POV characters to tell this story? Can you please let me get attached to one before you leap to an entirely new person/continent/century and my empathy has to start growing all over again? Drives me bonkers.
There's definitely a time and place for that, but i've been thinking of this lately as "knee jerk polyphony" -- when writers are drafting and things aren't quite working and they think they can save it by adding one more voice, then one more voice... until every time they realize some character has "a story of their own to tell" (I mean, who doesn't??) they feel compelled to give them their own voice.
I love it. “Knee-jerk Polyphony” sums it up exactly. I think I’m harder on this tendency than most readers, but personally, I attach deeply to the initial protagonist’s POV, so sudden shifts feel very jarring.
- References to characters "swallowing" before speaking, eg: "Bob swallowed. 'I think you need to leave,' he said."
- When characters speak in too-articulate paragraphs in ways that no one actually talks, though I'll give this one a pass if the dialogue is interesting enough
Ha, overly-articulate dialog is actually one of my...whatever the opposite of a pet peeve is. (Pet? Is it just a regular pet?)
Fair point, sometimes this sort of thing can be really delightful to read! I guess I should amend my peeve to be when it's done a little too ham handedly.
Yeah, if anything, it needs to be intentional. So it can be like: this is a hilarious romp with the kind of erudite madcap vibe that's going on, and that makes total sense for this book and these characters, and that's fun. Or it might be: oh I get it, author, you have Ideas and know big words, and then that's more of a slog.
[quickly checks book manuscript for donut smells]
I DARE you to put donuts in.
It's kind of already there. There was a favorite sweet puff pastry at Versailles called a whore fart (pet de putain). Basically a beignet. It's in the prologue, for obvious reasons.
You have put your finger on one of my big ones. Also cadence is important to me. I love Louise Penny but the consistency and predictability of her sentence cadence has stopped me from continuing to read her stuff.
How many times do I have to eventually realize that the blood-curdling scream I hear is actually coming from me?
A pet peeve I only recently realized is teenage characters who sound like adults. This feels unfairly judge-y, because I'm sure writing in a teenage voice is difficult, but in my current read a 17-year-old's internal dialogue says something like "it was frustrating, like scratching your rental car on the way to return it." What do 17-year-olds know about rental cars?!
I love this question (I actually wrote a post about my literary red flags recently and it was deeply fun to air out my grievances: https://wendyrobinson.substack.com/p/literary-red-flags). I have a special distaste for authors who use the phrase "ground out" as in "What are you doing?", Bob ground out in irritation.
No! This is how you end up with expensive dental work! Save your characters molars!