I was reading a book the other day and a character, an average middle aged, middle class, American man, thought to himself that the person he was seeing had a haircut that “looked expensive.”
I didn’t think anything of it immediately, other than thinking that I wouldn’t know an expensive-looking haircut if it bit me.
A while later I started wondering how likely it would be that this particular character would know an expensive-looking haircut either. Of course, maybe I’m unusual in not feeling that I can identify the cost of a haircut by glancing at a person (and if so, you can tell me!) but maybe the author was just trying to convey something by putting it into a character’s viewpoint where it doesn’t actually belong.
This might be a bad example, but have you encountered characters thinking things they just don’t seem likely to think, given their, well, characters?
Yeah, I see it a fair bit. It usually falls in one of two camps - the character knows something (say the varieties of unusual plants in a garden) with no hint that they know anyting about plants at all. Or they suddenly display some deep level of insight into someone else’s motives/behaviour again with no hint that they think that way.
Mind you, I don’t agree with your example. I only ever get my hair cut by old school comb and scissors barbers, and don’t care at all about looks/fashion, but I can tell an expensive haircut. In fact i think it is a good phrase, “Oh he’s one of those people with an expensive looking haircut.”
I’ve mostly noticed this when authors have characters “Noticing” things about the narrative that the author apparently intended to be understood by the reader, but which I read completely differently.
One example is from a serialized story I read many years ago, where in the recap of a previous installment, one character was described as thinking that another character’s reactions during a crisis (involving him shooting an animal) “Showed a hidden strain of cruelty” that disturbed her.
When I read the original scene, my impression was that the guy was calm, cool and collected during a major crisis, and did exactly what he should have done.
I recall a scene in one of Mercedes Lackey’s novels set in the universe of The Ship Who Sang where a male character recalls having had sex once with a robotic prostitute and “feeling used” afterwards. That just didn’t come across like a thing that a young male would think. Tacky or a loser yes, but not “being used”.
Especially since “being used” would generally mean that the other was gaining some benefit from the experience. Not what you’d expect from a robot prostitute.
Things of this sort that I notice are usually anachronisms in which people in either the past or the future display present-day attitudes. Two frequent offenders:
(1) people in the future who eccentrically prefer reading real printed books
(2) women in the past, often of royal birth, who want to get married for love
Jean Auel does this a lot with her male characters. After one scene with Ayla and Jondalar, I remember thinking, “A guy might say those words. A guy might perform those actions. But even Alan Alda and Phil Donahue would not think about it in those terms.”
Not just novels. We recently saw (damn, I can’t remember) a TV show (or movie) where one guy called the woman “Sis.” It was completely out of character and inconsistent with the story, simply poor screenwriting to remind the audience that they’re brother and sister. (If I do remember later, I’ll ask a mod to edit it into this post.)
The one that really stuck out at me was in one of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, the narrator who would have been born around 1980 characterizes someone as having “had a bad war in Vietnam.” I have never, ever heard anyone who wasn’t a Boomer or older use that phrase. Ever. I’m not even sure most people my age (born '76) would even really understand what that phrase is meant to convey, and even if they did, they’d be far more likely to say he had PTSD.
I see it not only in books, but also TV and film: a child with mature “beyond his/her years” intelligent and intuitive statements. I find myself thinking, a child that age would never say that.
Aside from authors jumping between (or mixing up) third-person limited and third-person omniscient narrative, I think what I notice/loathe the most is when a writer has an organization “thinking” or acting oddly out of character. Usually writing them more like a character than a group of people—and usually like an extension of the author.
And…mercy me, now I can’t think of any specific examples. Argh. :smack:
I remember a book (Mercedes Lackey, maybe?) in which everyone on Earth was now vegetarian, and had been so for centuries. Fine. However, there was at least one lengthy discussion in which two characters went on at length about how wonderful being a vegetarian was, and how awful it was that people in the past weren’t vegetarian.
Now, presumably the author did this because later on in the novel, one of those characters was trapped on a planet with other humans who decided to first start eating meat again and then became cannibals. But the conversation felt out of place, as if people today out of the blue said, “Hey, isn’t it great that people today know to keep drinking water away from outhouses,” and went on for several pages about it.
Also, in a Sherlock Holmes story published a few years ago, Holmes notes that a woman’s hair would “reach to her waist” if she let it down. It’s during the Victorian era in England. Many if not most women had hair that long. Also, there was no significance to the long hair in the plot.