Things you wish authors would stop doing?

The we just met but I'm deeply in forever love with you but you're a mysterious rich guy with fuck you money and angst and !drama!. You love me too and would die for me even though we met like two days ago.

 

Kinda like how, in The Walking Dead,

Spoiler: SPOILER!

they should've just left Lydia with Alpha.

 

Like

Spoiler: Avengers Spoilers

Dr. Strange not stopping time and cutting off Thanos' head?

 

Spoiler

He can't. Thamos has the Time Stone.

 

Spoiler: .

I meant instead of giving it to him. Yes, yes, Thanos had the other stones. But that's irrelevant. Before Thanos could even think to do anything, Strange could just stop time and do the deed.

 

Yup. I'm a sucker for world-building at the start. Not to a detriment, like in LoTR, but something like Hitchhiker's Guide, or Good Omens.

 

Hmm... The quote insert button seems to have disappeared. So...

But then the kid is a vehicle for engaging the reader. Most of the time, this sort of thing is meaningless, and that's bothersome. I just finished reading Lonesome Dove. A lot of that sort of thing happened, and in no way added to the story. Of course, there were times it happened and it added to the story. I can take tragedy, so long as it's meaningful.

 

Sometimes tragedy isn't, though.

As long as a character isn't killed off from a TV series because of a contract dispute...

 

I hate when authors get so full of themselves that they indulge in diarrhea of the keyboard. Like David Weber’s later Honor Harrington novels, or Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.

Sorry, JD

 

I think that's a problem with a lot of authors, especially the ones who get popular and their publisher is terrified of offending them by suggesting they need an editor. Because damn, there are a lot of them out there who get a taste of success and then completely forget how to write a lean, tightly-crafted novel.

 

YA that seems not only written for, but by under-twenties and are just riddled with continuity, technical, and perspective errors. I haven't read the book so this may be unfair, but I watched The Fifth Wave on Netflix the other night. Minor spoilers, I guess I should wrap them:

Spoiler

1) How the fuck do you know this? The First Wave is an EMP that knocks out all communications. No radio, no TV, no cell phones. Yet then the narrator knows that this happened on a global scale, knows that every island in the world got flooded (more later), and knows a shit-ton of other stuff that someone who had spent the entire movie glued to CNN might not, but then, there's no more CNN. Oh, and the EMP causes car accidents too. I could be wrong on this, but I think brakes and steering still work when the electrical system is shot. No power brakes or power steering which will cause some problems, but they don't simply become unguided rolling inertial missiles when the chips fry. (Side note: when I was learning to drive in the late 80s, my dad was mistrustful of the power brakes and steering on our van, so once I was fairly confident he took me out to a big empty parking lot and did immediate action drills by reaching over and shutting off the engine while I was trying to make a corner. A 70s Dodge van has a lot of inertia.)

2) Earthquakes don't work that way. Trees, especially smaller slender ones, are pretty well rooted in the ground by, well, roots. There's an earthquake, the heroine is in the forest, and the trees nearest her keep falling at her. However, the rest of the forest is untouched and when she needs a tree to escape the tsunami, there's one conveniently located. And tsunamis simultaneously strike every coastline in the world and flood "every" island completely. I guess the mechanism for this is covered in the books, but the maximum elevation of Papua New Guinea, for example, is over 4000 meters. The top of Mt. Fuji, which is on the island of Honshu, is 3,776 meters. Hollywood always overestimates the amount of water in the world anyway though.

3) Pain hurts, and wounds take time to heal: MC takes a direct hit from some sort of deer rifle on the center front of her thigh. The costumers and effects people must have drawn a line between the seams of the denim and the points of her hip and kneecap when they placed the "wound". She manages to limp away before passing out, and within a day or two she's running. I sprained my ankle a few years ago, had it in a walking cast for two weeks or so, and it's still a little swollen compared to the other side and has slightly less flexibility.

4) PTSD is real. She believes she's under threat and blows away an injured man. He's the first and only (IIRC) person she actually kills, the only other time I recall her firing a weapon is when she gives some panicky suppressive fire with a handgun after taking the thigh shot. She has a shocked moment after she realizes the man she's just killed was only holding a cross necklace, not a gun, but after that it's back to "gotta save the kid, no problems here, my you've got dreamy eyes."

There were some sciencey-sounding words badly misused in her survivor info-dump voiceover as well that I can't recall, but basically it was a pile of tropes badly pasted together and all too typical of a lot of the book-based YA films out there these days. Younger readers may not need things to be utterly grimdark and realistic, but there's no need to rot their heads while you're trying to make a buck entertaining them.

 

What you mentioned is one I HATE. No decent person wants to kill anyone else. I could kill a baby easier than a older human, because the child has no fear. The baby has no idea what's coming, and I would make it a quick and painless as possible. It wouldn't beg for it's life and that would undo me. I can't stand any living thing in pain or fear, especially before it dies. But that is just my thought process. Plus, sometimes it's the greater good. 1 life against billions...thousands of other babies will die. But that's ok as long as the one in the story lives. I feel awkward when I read people who have this plot idea because I hate it but don't want to cause a fight or upset the person with the idea.

Other things...
Blogs or articles - so you get an author who is writing an article that is a how to. How to create interesting characters or how to write a character goal. But they never just get on with it. They launch into a history of themselves, their writing, shamelessly plug their book, and tell us how they came to the revelation they are about to share...it's no different from other revelation on the same topic. I don't care about your life history. Just start talking about what I came here for.

Over the top names or names spelled in an exotic style. "Mary" spelled "mazzertyle" - huh? the writer will say it's pronounced as "Mary" just a different spelling. Yeah, one I can't pronounce and that looks nothing like the more familiar form. Using Mae constantly as a middle or double-barrel name. It's May so why spell it with an e? Overly exotic names the character doesn't need and it's not a common spelling to their country. Or names like Scarlett Elizabeth Mae Grayson. You feel like the writer threw all their favourite names into a list form. They fuss and fret over naming and when you ask them. "What's your character's goal or fears or flaws." They have no clue. They focus too long on the wrong thing. Or they give an appearance and personality and ask you to give a name. Those things wouldn't have been known when the parents named that baby. You don't pick a name you love you pick a name the parents would have chosen. Or a list of crazy names and then a Bob thrown in. This is mostly done by amateur writers. Names that just don't fit the character or their life at all.

People who just keep writing the same thing. Usually because that's all they read. I don't mean keep writing the same Genre I mean keep writing the exact same plot, in the exact same setting with the exact same characters and just rename everything and everyone. Or people who just keep writing their version of Games of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. They just get stuck on elves, dwarves and dragons in a medieval environment. To me that's been done to death. People like what they like and that's fine but it does get on my nerves a little. I love those things too but I love originality more.

But the biggest peeve for me, because it always ends in me feeling dissatisfied is writers with no insight. Or who make promises without awareness then fail to deliver them. I watched a TV show recently where this was the exact problem. They made a promise about a character that they were aware of and they forfilled that. But they also made another promise I think they weren't aware of and actually admitted they weren't and they failed to deliver on that promise. They had no insight into their audience or what their audience wanted to see, just stuck to their plan and didn't adjust anything. We stuck with this story line for 9 months to get a terrible ending. Not saying you should cater to the audience but be aware of what your doing and what you're setting up.

 

The wedged character description paragraph, most felonious when it presents in any narrative mode other than 3rd omniscient. You know the one, a tip-to-toe description, often quite literally starting at the hair and ending with the shoes, a description that serves as a police sketch artist's wet dream because no human alive ever actually visually engages another human in that manner. Ever. But the you must see it as I see it neurosis takes over and we get a description that lacks all context and serves as one of the most ubiquitous forms of inadvertent narrative intrusion one is likely to encounter.

The stage crew paragraph. What works a nerve for me here is the way it illuminates the twisted way in which in media res is typically defined. People often incorrectly engage in media res in only its most extreme form, as though it necessarily means that the story starts in the middle of a stabbing or the matter/antimatter core has just exploded or some other fever-pitched moment. Jinkies. When did the world become either zero or ten and never any sign of a five or six. In media res can simply be in the middle of a conversation or other event that doesn't require insane klaxons. But, since insane klaxons is what many assume, in the acceptance of that idea they also create the other side to the coin, aka the stage crew paragraph at the beginning of the story. This was here and that was there and there were some of these and a few of those and over in this corner there was a... and by the window there was a... and the carpet... and the woodwork... and the walls... and dear god, save me from this portion of the play that should have happened with the curtain still down and the audience none the wiser.

 

I wish people would stop saying "start the story in the middle of an action". I know this has been mentioned but it's really annoying.

 

That was really difficult to read.

 

This came up in a set of novels by Jeff VanderMeer, the Southern Reach trilogy, which was turned into the visually sumptuous but thematically bankrupt film Annihilation. The second book - the narrative of which is utterly and completely missing from the film - consists mainly of a chase up the southeastern coast of the United States, which, unfortunately, is described in great detail, but that detail is dead wrong. He describes a coast much more akin to that of the Pacific Northwest. It was an unusual flaw in an otherwise delicious set of books.

 

Are you sure this is things you hate that authors do, or... don't you live in Scotland? Doesn't just about everybody have...

 

But most especially if the story contains people who have magic powers and people who don't. The auburn hair and emerald eyes as a marker for magicking ability is much older than Hogwarts, reaching well back into the Fantasy works of the 60's and 70's.

All this assuming the writer doesn't instead lean into (drumroll please) heterochromia. OOoooOOoooo! (insert wetly audible eye-roll)

 

You're thinking of Ireland, where there are a lot of people of Celtic origin.

This is what a Scottish redhead looks like.

 

But is that really a fictional device? Isn't it rooted in myth and folklore?

How about having only two fingers and a thumb on one hand as a mark of prophecy?

 

Lord Foul's Bane... just the worst, and not because of the reason people nearly always claim, but because after that event, we are treated to the most tedious, most boring, most pointless travelogue fantasy ever to slip between the covers of a book.