Things you wish authors would stop doing?

Incomplete backstory. I'm binge re-watching all seven seasons of Star Trek TNG, and it's annoying when a character (usually Picard) gets all preachy about how the Federation has ended want, and hunger and pollution without any details about what the current system looks like or how it was achieved. Still pretty good at war, aren't you?

 

100% militarized "citizen" population like the Spartiate class, helots don't count as people?

 

It's hard to grok a society where all the citizens wear either a military uniform or a toga.

 

I mentioned this before somewhere, but originally Sparta was a peace-loving city-state, until a Germanic tribe called the Dorians (which gave history the Doric column) came down and conquered them.

Many parts of the Hellenic world required military service to reach citizenship, including Athens. Plato's name actually means 'The Broad-Shouldered'. He was a wrestler. People were required to attend gymnasiums, which were in every area. And of course the Olympic games emerged from the physical culture popular in the region.

 

1.

Similar to complaints above about over-describing characters, but a more extreme position (which is a personal dislike, but which I wouldn't dare try defend because even I think its unreasonable):

I really don't like it when authors even loosely physically describe a character if it includes details that are strictly superfluous to the story.

If they are meant to be physically intimidating, sure, help me out. If they look weedy then the same, give me a clue. If they look suspiciously like another character, or are supposed to be down and out, and so on and so forth.

But anything else, even pretty reasonably descriptions that are simply meant to help distinguish between characters, those I don't like. E.g. he's ginger haired, she's half-Chinese, they're stocky.

Why? Because my mind very quickly comes up with a look for characters. I can't help it. But if I imagine someone to be blonde, when the book insists they are ginger, when neither actually impacts on the story, then I have to either ignore the author or try perform some imagination-station surgery.

Probably most people are more open to having their imagination shaped by the author's descriptions, as I suspect I should be.

The same applies to settings sometimes, which gets daft. If a story happens in a house and the specifics of the house don't seem to matter much, then I have a couple of houses in stock-memory, one of which I immediately place the story within.

It is all the worse (and I would defend this bit) when they leave a details (ginger hair) until after you are already well acquainted with the character/setting.

Authors with an uncanny way with the descriptive turn of phrase can overcome all the above. Raymond Chandler for example. But other authors, great in their own way, can leave me tuning out almost all their descriptions, thereafter simply applying their plot to my unconsciously decided descriptions.

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2.

When the author gives us an event which meant to be background, but is shocking and grabs you by the testes. However because it was only meant to be flavour and the author doesn't care about it and didn't mean for you to care about it they don't treat it with the respect it deserves.
These examples are from screen, where I think this happens more often because of cutting, editing, writers room argy-bargies and so on:
1. The protagonist's missing child in Minority Report. That's a harrowing sub-plot... How did they not realise it should be the main driving force of the film? Don't put it in there if you aren't going to acknowledge that.
2. An episode of Jonathan Creek when an idiot accidentally helps sell female gymnasts into slavery, but the plot chooses not to spend any of its precious 45 minutes to tell us whether they are ever rescued.

 

Agreed. I've had readers mention that I didn't provide information about a character's size, race, age, etc., and my reply is always, "That's your [the reader's] job".

 

Sometimes at least this is the result of a particularly bland form of sexual fantasy, where the male reader/author is subconsciously fantasising about a world where they don't need to actually learn about women or meet women where women are (figuratively speaking). They are immature so they wish women were less like women, more like men, so they wouldn't have to learn about them. To be precise, they wish women were more like how they imagine men are: sexually forward and uncomplicated, even though their own male MC isn't either of those things. Sexually mature fantasies, healthy or otherwise, are not afraid of the object of attraction having complex differences from them.

And that dodgy dynamic can be fine, at least from a literary or writing steamy prose point of view, if not necessarily from a healthy-for-society point of view. But typically the reader isn't made to confront the reality that a woman who throws herself at a stand-off-ish arsehole, a 'bad boy' or just a passive sexual attention sponge who gives her nothing back, is going to be a more complex person who is harder to understand and will bring her own weirdness to the tale. She might be crazy needy, or very maternal, or she has an agenda which isn't really about the protagonist, or trying to work through something the protagonist really didn't bank on dealing with. Good erotica, even bad-for-your-self-respect good erotica, can handle that. Most don't bother.

I haven't read these for so long, but maybe they are something like the de-sexed inverse of the above. Girls fantasising that they don't really need to understand romance or courting to get boyfriend-material attention.

 

I'm just impressed about how many quotes you used and not mess up. I still haven't mastered that. Totally unrelated.

 

If it matters to the overall narrative, mention it. If not, the reader can fill it in as they please.

 

Like a lot of these things, I think it's more complicated and subtle than that, at least some of the time.

The stereotype for a long time was that "good girls don't like sex" and if they do, they certainly don't admit to it. To the point where an asexual purity became almost synonymous with being female, and sex is something that women grudgingly tolerate at best ("men are beasts"). Even today, there's still a strong undercurrent of the man being the one who should do all the approaching (and risk all the rejection). So in that light, it's a fantasy of a woman who is "just as horny as I am" is a liberating one. No risk of rejection, no dancing around and playing TEMKEK games, just skip right to mutual enjoyment where two people who want the same thing get it.

 

Yes I agree. Although even when understandable liberating fantasies can have a tendency flatten out the interesting differences between different people.

See for example Arthur C Clarke. His vision of the future often has as its background a world with his liberating fantasy where only a few 'sensible' religions are left (a sort of soft-core Anglican Buddhism), where people have literally no interest in each other's race, where marriages can always be dissolved amicably after five years if they aren't working out, where education has gotten us over our superstitions rather than amplified them.

I love his stories, I love the scale of his ideas that can still blow my tiny mind. But I'm not sure those elements of the liberating fantasy add to the interest of his worlds. They are what he hoped for for the future, so fair enough.

We are of one mind that it is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something else.