Hi, Thanks for your replies boys and girls. I'm learning heaps from you. Do you know what else can decrease a story's quality? Thank you!
I agree. Now it may be better to leave it at that for the author and the reader's idea of handsome may be completely different and if the reader is allowed to conjure up their own picture of a handsome man they may relate better to it. Thinking ahead, should the novel turns out to be a international best seller, all the more reason for the author not to describe their own view of handsome, Italian/Norwegian/Chinese/Indian and 'Goth' women will all have their own idea of handsome. Beauty as they say is in the eye of the beholder.
Sure I can give more detractors, but first let me clarify one thing. Earlier in the thread, someone mentioned infodumps and backstory being treated as one and the same. This isn't quite right, but it's definitely very close. An infodump is something you never want to do, and it's a huge block of spoonfeeding information to readers in a telling-not-showing format. A backstory, on the other hand, is just information about the character's past. You could weave it in naturally, efficiently and rock the coolest backstory in the coolest novel. (That's how you want to do it -- slip in a line here and a line there so the reader can piece it all together as they read without being bogged down.) Or, you could butcher it. Backstory isn't good or bad, it's just the character's past. However, they're interconnected because -- and this is what the person's statement referred to, I think -- most huge infodumps are about backstory. You know, the kinds that go "Now, 100 years ago, Fredropolous had three immortal wizard children and...." yada yada yada. ------------------------------------------- Okay, now on to more pet peeves: Dramatic irony can be taken too far. This is the technique where the reader knows something the main character does not know (i.e. if something is revealed through another character's POV scene), and it can be used quite effectively to create suspense. There are plenty of times when you'll want it. However, if you do it overboard, it will infuriate me. I will think the MC is an idiot for not getting any of the hints. I'll want to throttle her and tell her to use her head and all of her subsequent actions will just frustrate me. Also, I don't like it when fantasy characters (or any characters, but who does it for other genres?) have names like Lynarvvorianyan and Chryslyaxxioioa. Okay, that probably exaggerates it a tad bit, but you get the idea. Unique settings should definitely have unique character names that sound diffferent from ours, of course, but make it SIMPLE. Something relatable, pronounceable, preferably no longer than three syallbles. Characters with magic traits are fine, but I do not want to read about any mind-reading abilities, always-right intuitions, handy-dandy healing powers, superman strength etc. This is especially the case when it allows characters to solve their problems without any effort or blink of an eye: it's annoying as hell when a main character is never intimidated or threatened by anything. If a character has a magic power, okay, but make its use come at a cost. Don't do it in a way that makes your character perfect.
These seriously lower the odds of me finishing a book -- and simultaneously increase the odds of me bad-mouthing it and lowering potential sales. It is a sin to waste the reader's time. 1. Inconsistent, unbelievable characters 2. Technology that has no limits (also, magic that has no limits) 3. Authors who break their own, in-story rules 4. Characters who get lucky breaks solely because the author lurves them 5. Incompetent characters. This one is a personal thing. I'd like to not regard the people I'm reading about as total idiots. They can be misguided, ignorant, outmatched; that's fine. But if they are utterly stupid and incompetent, they'd better have some redeeming feature - like their personality is consistent in other ways, and forceful, and moves the plot along. (Cersei Lannister is borderline here; she has a highly inflated sense of her own abilities, and she's stupid in many ways, but she's also conniving and backstabbing and her allies make up for a lot. And she's motivated first by the urge to protect her children, which is realistic even if she's horrible.) 6. A bland setting. Don't tell me that it was a normal living room, with furniture and vertical walls and a floor with a ceiling opposite. Instead, give me furniture that's cushy, because the housewife is the wife of a mob boss, and the cushier the seats, the slower a person can stand up and attack / defend themselves. Or whatever. The point is, if I can't describe your setting at all, something important is missing. (Also, it's harder to visualize. For me, that matters. I understand there are people who think only in words / text, but for me, setting is crucial to picturing the story.) 7. Characters who are total jerks in some fashion. They must have redeeming features to work, or at least some aspect of their personality that isn't off-putting. If your character comes off as someone I wouldn't willingly spend time with, why should I keep reading? (The character of John Matherson in One Second After, for example, manages to be incompetent, misogynistic, patronising, and a jerk to every sane authority figure who might possibly make things better. In a real crisis, he would likely have been tossed out of the Mayor's office on his arse or shot. If you must read this book, read it for the mother-in-law, who is both competent and undervalued, or with friends present so you can mock it mercilessly by reading hilariously bad exerpts to your friends. Or read it because it's basically the only disaster novel that deals with EMP specifically. But note that the author screwed the science up there, too, curse it.) 8. Authors who get science or history horribly wrong 9. Characters with unclear or nonexistant motivations. If your character has no purpose, why should I be interested? 10. Books with no ending or resolution to the main plot(s). If this is telegraphed to the reader fairly early, it's fine; see If On A Winter's Night A Traveler for a book that doesn't finish all of its plot threads by any stretch of the imagination. But if the reader comes along for 300 pages, you'd better give them a decent ending. Even in a series, you should use the ending chapters to wrap up one or two plot arcs while the main one continues into the next book.
I'm fairly new to the whole creative writing thing, and couldn't help but notice after reading a few of the posts here that the beginning of my current/first story is rather clichéd . It, unfortunately, does begin with the MC waking up... and eventually looking in the mirror. There's no real description as to his looks though, just a reference to the beating he took the previous night - would this still be considered to be irksome? If anyone feels compelled to check it out (a critique would be highly appreciated ) it can be found here https://www.writingforums.org/showthread.php?t=38016
It depends - two out of my three novels begin with someone waking up. One goes on to use a mirror. Neither are a cliched way to wake up (One is rowing with his dad and the other is throwing an alarm clock in his sleep at a man in his bedroom), with the mirror I use it to compare two brothers - the image is important as it is related to a parentage issue later on, also my character for the book is so damn vain he would be looking in the mirror to check his appearence, and would be comparing himself favourably with someone else lol Oh and just remembered have a mirror moment in the first one, again ti is reasonable for him to be doing so he is trying to make himself look presentable for his dad - I have him proud of the shiner, bruises and split lip lol A lot of things that are cliche can be made to work.
Contagion -- the waking up/mirror thing has its exceptions, as does everything else. I've started chapters with someone waking up, but it's always because something jarring happens to jolt them out of bed. The mirror thing being used to show a beating is fine. After all, if someone was badly beaten the night before, it's completely normal to go to the mirror the next day and check out the bruises. When I say to avoid it, I'm only talking about the stuff where the MC wakes up to sunlight streaming in the window, thinks about herself and her life as an excuse to infodump character backstory, and then goes over to the mirror and "I looked at my blue eyes, brown hair and the rounded chin I got from my father" blah blah blah.
Hehe, Well my friend told me, that for him inconsistent characters. Or in sci-fi, if a character has too much powers, that could lead to story stalemate.
Starting w/out a good action hook. Info dumps / long drawn out backstory. Unbelievable actions - even if it IS fantasy. Telling me everything instead of showing me & allowing my imagination to work too. Using cliches, typical similes, & boring metaphors. Not being unique I guess. That's about sums it up for me.
& what's worse.... I've had it pointed out in my work that IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII do it some times. ugh. *face in palm*
I hate it when the characters tell the story repeatedly, when we (the readers) already know everything that is going on with the story and they keep doing this over, and over, and over.... To certain fiction author who is doing this to me write now, Just let us find out for ourselves the same instance the characters do at the END. It save me having a headache. Then I won't be tempted to stop reading your novel when I'm so close to being finished and finally done with it. Blah!
I read your story & I didn't feel it was cliche in that way. You didn't state his dark hair, dark eyes, thin lips, thinning hair, etc. It was just to tell us how he looked AFTER his hellish night. I thought it was nicely done. The whole point of your scene was to remember what happened the night before. Again, I thought it was nicely done.
Hello everyone, Thanks for replying. I liked what this guy told me: "when you linger on a single political issue... and then bludgeon the reader with your solution to said political issue... it makes me want to close the book and never read it again. It's really obnoxious. And it happens far too often." Do you know of more obnoxious things in writing? Later!
Yeah, that too...if you want to address a political issue, make a fictional version of it that can be relatable but isn't too similar.
Lack of action,mostly. Unsympathizing characters and info-dump on the setting too. About character descriptions, it doesn't bother me. I like to know what the writer wants me to know. Just don't describe every little change in clothes your character have.
