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.
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!
- 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 - Boring
books 4 - Using
words incorrectly, modern words/phrases in a
non-modern setting, overusing words or phrases 6 - Too
much filler, i.e. back story, description, and “info-dumps,” flashbacks,
Turgid, flowery writing, interrupting exciting plot to describe
surroundings 21 - Monologues,
(constant and internal) 4 - Bad
grammar and punctuation, overused exclamation points, passive voice, bad
writing -unedited 13 - Dangling
plot threads, i.e. plot points that are not answered or completed or just
disappear, plot inconsistencies 4 - Formulaic
writing 2 - Inconsistent
character actions- their actions don’t match their described characters. - Repeating
too much of earlier plot lines in later books in a series. 3 - First
person perspective, Second person perspective 3 - Characters
that don’t grow or change 2 - Author
insertions in a third person book. 4 - Boring
characters 2 - “Telling”
instead of “showing” 2 - Too
many footnotes - Books
that are rushed because of deadlines 3 - Characters
that say, “Come with,” when they want other characters to join them. - Characters
described as elderly when they’re in the 50s 5 - Saying
“I could care less” when they mean “I couldn’t care less” - 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 - Insecure
characters (who shouldn’t be insecure because they’ve been described as
beautiful) - Characters
that wake up thinking or missing their alarm - “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.” - Stories that start
with too many characters in dialogue. - Stories that start
with unnamed characters doing something mysterious. - Bad sex scenes,
the heroine thinking “It won’t fit!”, Sex scenes that aren’t sexy,
physically impossible sex scenes 6 - 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 - YA books that
aren’t really YA 2 - Characters saying
other characters names too many times. 2 - Head hopping 2
- Evil characters
who always know what the protagonist is going to do and has no rational
motive for wanting to harm them. 3 - Characters that
speak phonetically because they are uneducated so you can’t understand
them. 4 - 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 - 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 - 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 - Lack of research 4
- Too
many happy Endings - 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 - Logic gaps in plots (where a character
knows something at one point and doesn’t at another) 3
Lol. I never understood why zombies are able to run fast enough to catch and hold a live person. Whatever happened to rigor mortis?