What Readers Hate




I had the lovely chance, while bored out of my skull, to
find a thread on Amazon.com called “What drives you nuts in a book?”  I took my time to go over the thread and
decided it was a very helpful resource for authors.  I’ve compiled an abridged list of some of the
most-hated occurrences in books below. The numbers at the end are the amount of times the same or similar dislike was posted that I could count. The numbers might have changed since then.

 
Enjoy!




  1. Cheating:
    Getting your characters out of a tough situation the easy way (i.e. they
    suddenly have the exact skill needed to succeed- without it ever having
    been mentioned in the book before.) or deus ex machine cheats. Impossible
    escapes, contrived endings 9
  2. Boring
    books 4
  3. Using
    words incorrectly, modern words/phrases in a
    non-modern setting, overusing words or phrases 6
  4. Too
    much filler, i.e. back story, description, and “info-dumps,” flashbacks,
    Turgid, flowery writing, interrupting exciting plot to describe
    surroundings 21
  5. Monologues,
    (constant and internal)  4
  6. Bad
    grammar and punctuation, overused exclamation points, passive voice, bad
    writing -unedited 13
  7. Dangling
    plot threads, i.e. plot points that are not answered or completed or just
    disappear, plot inconsistencies 4
  8. Formulaic
    writing 2
  9. Inconsistent
    character actions- their actions don’t match their described characters.
  10. Repeating
    too much of earlier plot lines in later books in a series. 3
  11. First
    person perspective, Second person perspective 3
  12. Characters
    that don’t grow or change 2
  13. Author
    insertions in a third person book. 4
  14. Boring
    characters 2
  15. “Telling”
    instead of “showing” 2
  16. Too
    many footnotes
  17. Books
    that are rushed because of deadlines 3
  18. Characters
    that say, “Come with,” when they want other characters to join them.
  19. Characters
    described as elderly when they’re in the 50s 5
  20. Saying
    “I could care less” when they mean “I couldn’t care less”
  21. Perfect
    characters (i.e. too beautiful, too handsome, too strong etc…), Heroines that
    continue to investigate no matter how injured, hungry, or tired they are.
    They never eat/sleep. Characters that are overly brave or courageous

    3
  22. Insecure
    characters (who shouldn’t be insecure because they’ve been described as
    beautiful)
  23. Characters
    that wake up thinking or missing their alarm
  24. Stories that start
    before the dawn of time. Stories that start with a dream sequence. Stories
    that start with the birth of the main character. Stories that start three
    chapters too soon, so you can see the character’s ordinary life.”
  25. Stories that start
    with too many characters in dialogue.
  26. Stories that start
    with unnamed characters doing something mysterious.
  27. Bad sex scenes,
    the heroine thinking “It won’t fit!”, Sex scenes that aren’t sexy,
    physically impossible sex scenes 6
  28. Stories that start
    with a shock factor,  horrific
    rape/murder/violent scenes told in graphic detail, repeating those scenes
    or similar scenes over and over 4
  29. YA books that
    aren’t really YA 2
  30. Characters saying
    other characters names too many times. 2
  31. Head hopping 2
  32. Evil characters
    who always know what the protagonist is going to do and has no rational
    motive for wanting to harm them. 3
  33. Characters that
    speak phonetically because they are uneducated so you can’t understand
    them. 4
  34. Bad endings,
    endings where the character wakes up and it was all a dream, or where a
    character never existed- was a figment of the protagonist’s imagination
    and the ending shows it, abrupt endings 7
  35. Clueless
    characters in contemporary settings, contemporary settings that don’t
    conform to modern technology, or “dead zones” for cells, or when the
    batteries in a device or car go dead at a crucial moment, or they get to
    safety- and don’t have keys to enter or drive off 6
  36. Plots where the character
    falls/twists ankle running away from the antagonist (or when they drop
    something and scramble in the leaves) or when they spend their time
    hopping and dashing and dodging- only to trip and fall, or characters that
    are supposed to be smart that tell the antagonist where they live or how
    to reach them and don’t go to the police or jog without their cell, or
    characters that search for the antagonist, stupid heroines, unrealistic-
    not true to life plot 9
  37. Lack of research 4
  38. Too
    many happy Endings
  39. Completing
    dialogue with too many “he said.” Or “she said.” Not necessary.  Or not being able to tell which part of
    the dialogue belongs to which character 3
  40.  Logic gaps in plots (where a character
    knows something at one point and doesn’t at another) 3
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Comments

  1. Lol. I never understood why zombies are able to run fast enough to catch and hold a live person. Whatever happened to rigor mortis?

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