One of the most useful writing exercises I’ve ever encountered was something a high school English teacher taught me: she had us write an entire story (well, it was a timed exercise, so write as much as we could) without using any adjectives.
So whenever I write something, I always mentally (or actually) erase all the adjectives I have, and if a sentence doesn’t make sense without it, I change it so that it does. Then, when that’s done, I add some of the adjectives back in.
I hate this with a passion, though I have sympathy because in my own writing I’m pretty good at it, but it’s hard. It takes a lot of work. You need to pay a lot of attention to the way other people talk, and often it needs to be people outside your immediate circle, because speech patterns among people close to each other tend to normalize.
Conversely, I HATE it when writers show accents phonetically, by misspelling words. Ugh. For some reason, Irish and Scottish accents are particularly abused in this fashion. (But I love it when writers capture speech patterns without butchering words)
I really hate it when a character is used to provide explanations for the audience. Dan Brown is a huge offender of this.
This is my summary of the Da Vinci Code:
“The Last Supper, isn’t that like an important painting?”, Sophie asked, sheepishly.
“Oh ho ho. You pathetic woman with your puny woman brain.”, Langdon cocked. “It is more than that. More than you will ever know. But for now we must haste.”
Margaret Mitchell did this with slave dialogue in Gone With the Wind. I don’t know if it was normal at the time (1930s) but it was a bit hard to read.
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander) has Jamie talk in a Scottish accent, as well as speak the Gaelic, but it works. From what I understand, Gaelic is a wonderful language to curse in.
It’s not my greatest peeve and one of the classic faux-pas to boot, but most of my large ones have all been named.
Self-conscious attempts to evade the word “said” always piss me off. I don’t know whom to hate more: Authors whose characters hiss, chuckle, smile, opine etc. their entire dialogue, or creative writing teachers who tell their students not to use “said”.
Also, failure to do research. I’m fairly computer illiterate, but even I knew there was something wrong when Colin Forbes once had an internet connection break with a screeching noise and the screen filling with snow.
Oh, sorry, I was trying to answer Starving Artist, who asked what the right punctuation would actually be for that fragment, but I left off the quote. I knew you were joking; it was very funny! I shouldn’t write after my bedtime.
Related to this is “being too vague about items people are using/carrying in period fiction”.
For example, the Ben Elton novel The First Casualty is set in the trenches of WWI but never describes the guns the soldiers are carrying beyond “Rifle” or “Pistol”, with one exception. And you know that the exception is obviously going to be important to the plot later, because it’s the only gun in the entire novel identified by make.
Now, I’m not saying that I expect every mention of a gun or vehicle or aeroplane to be ultra-detailed, but a simple “The French soldier adjusted his Lebel rifle” or “The British messenger kick-started his BSA motorcyle” occasionally does wonders for adding colour to the story and indicates that the author at least tried to do some research. Especially when things like “Military Firearms of WWI and WWII by country” has been easily obtainable information from books since… well, pretty much since WWI and WWII respectively. And now that we have the internet, there’s even less excuse for not getting it right, IMHO.
In my own writing, I admit to being horrible with metaphors and I tend to avoid them like the plague.
I’m reading a new book now, by someone I know personally, and I wondering how other people handle it if you are asked for your opinion (in a casual, not critique type fashion) when you feel like there were so many things that could have really made the book better. For example- I’m 3/4s of the way through it, there is plenty of plot line that could involve conflict and really keep you on the edge of your seat, emotional stuff like an abusive stepfather, single pregnant mother , orphaned kids, new baby, etc. that, and the author never lets that conflict really happen. It might look dodgy for half a page, but every…single…time, it just continues on without conflict, problem solved, move to the next non-issue.
He did this before with another book he wrote, but at least he had the first chapter, it was golden. Great character, action, suspense- then he killed off the character and the rest of the book never had anything that came close to that first chapter. ARRRGGH!! I did tell him I was sorry to see my favorite character go (hint hint) in the very FIRST chapter. THE FIRST!!!
Now granted, I am tough on my characters- human and animal. On my latest NanoWriMo, I feel like the Marquis de Sade but at least things happen and the characters have to deal with it over several chapters and not just for a few paragraphs.
The other thing this person is guilty of is wish fulfillment- for example, his character just randomly bought 4 wild horses to run free on his ranch. No build up, no direct relation to the story (and I have no faith that they will matter later), just a chance to have romanticized animals roaming in his fantasy land. I wouldn’t be so hard on him- it’s just frustrating because the writing is technically competent and the story has so much potential. Just makes me want to bang my head against the wall when I read it. I will probably will just tell him I liked it though- I’ll admit to having a thin skin myself when it comes to my writing.
Heh. I really like Need by local writer Carrie Jones, but I e-mailed the publishers to note that they might want to do a tiny revision before they did any reprintings: It’s fairly obvious that in one line a third of the way through the book Zara heard a sucking noise, not a sucking nose.
My top pet peeves have already been named in the thread, so I’ll go with a minor yet fervent one: foreign characters who pepper their dialogue with simple expressions and words from their native language, to let you know that they’re, like, foreign. The Mexican housekeeper who drops ‘por favor’ and ‘gracias’ into her otherwise perfectly stated English sentence, the French exchange student who ends his own fluent English sentence with ‘merci’ or ‘mon dieu!’ I didn’t pick up on this so much until I moved to a distant land and started making my way through a second language, but the parts of your own language that find their way into the foreign language are the complicated words for which you have no adequate substitute. The simple words are the first that you learn and the ones with which you have the greatest comfort level.
Isn’t this usually done for the benefit of the reader, though? I mean, it’s a reminder that the speaker should be speaking in a French accent or whatever, rather than an error on the writer’s part (usually).
The corollary to this is “untranslated foreign text because the writer assumes their readers can all speak French/Spanish/Japanese”, which you used to see in older English novels- particularly with French and Latin (which all ‘educated’ people were expected to have learnt at school).
I don’t find it that clumsy, as I’ve heard it happen in real life, when at least one of the participants does not speak as well in the native language as they do in English. I mean, I see Latinos who greet each other with “Hola” or “Que honda” all the time, and all the waiters at my favorite Mexican restaurant will switch back and forth all the time.
It seems to me that some authors have this thought process.
*Well, I’ve just written a story that really delves into the darkest corners of my mind. I’m proud of this serious text about a dark subject matter in a realistic fashion.
Now just let me tack on this here happy ending and it will be all done.*
Even worse is when all of the description and confusion are arising over something that would only be apparent in writing, not speech.
Something like… Say you have a character with a strange name and you want your readers to know how to pronounce it. You might write something like:
“Hi, I’m John Zyzzyx.”
“Hello, Mr. Zeezzeex, I will be your waitress this evening.”
“Oh, sorry, it’s Zizzix, with a short I.”
Or something like that. I’ve never seen anything quite that clumsy, but you get the idea.
A few months ago I had to type up a family friend’s handwritten manuscript of a novel, and it was the most atrociously written thing I’ve ever read in my life. There were so many problems with it I don’t know where to begin, but the one that bothered me most was that he seemed to get when to show and when to tell completely backwards. That and way, way too many instances of unrealistic dialogue with unnecessary stage directions, like
It drove me crazy, but I was only asked to type the book up, not edit it, so I had to keep my mouth shut. Torture.
Wow, that’s one of my favorite books of all time. (It’s been awhile since I reread it, as it, and all of the rest of my books and DVDs have been sitting in boxes at my parents’ house for OVER A YEAR despite my mom’s promise to send them to me LAST AUGUST MOM ARE YOU READING THIS I WANT MY BOOKS AND DVDS NOW.) I’m a woman, and it didn’t bother me at all. IIRC, there’s only one scene that actually has a direct comparison to Star Wars, and the narrator can’t remember what any of the aliens are called. She’s just watched it a bunch of times with her son.
