Slytherin as well 
I might be in the minority but I don’t mind Mary Sue characters most of the time. As long as its well written, I can easily imagine that some people just get lucky or have life hand them stuff on a silver platter. Some people are just naturally charming, or good looking, or athletic without having to do a lot of work. I think our escapist fantasy deep down is hoping we are one of these people, so when I read about them, it doesn’t bother me as much as make me jealous
The novel “Stoner” contrast the peace loving dad with the neurotic, complaining mother. Mum complains that their little daughter is wearing her out; The dad has that same daughter sitting peacefully at his feet for hours and hours a day while he finishes his master thesis. The daughter is four freaking years old.
Anyone who thinks that a four-year-old will let you work for more then ten minutes before interrupting, has never actually babysat one. The author clearly intended for us to sympathise with Stoner and to hate the complaining mother. He achieved the opposite with me.
Expository dialog. "Hello, my best friend Helen whom I have known since I was five. Your husband, whose name is Robert, is waiting outside in his green Oldsmobile that the two of you bought in 2005 after you got a bonus in your job in marketing… "
When I get to the part where it reads like the author got tired of writing,and turned the manuscript over to one of his grad student to finish for him. Like “Lonesome Dove”. I though it was truly great through the first half, but quit somewhere after that and never even finished it. Never finished “The Tin Drum”, either.
Especially if, somewhere in the publication process, a line gets dropped! The reader gets used to the A, B, A, B alteration of voices, and suddenly realizes that he’s got the wrong guy speaking. This happens a lot in Roger Zelazny’s “Amber” series of novels. I don’t think it’s his fault; it looks like a typesetting screw-up.
I like long stretches of unattributed dialogue…when the author is deft enough that you can clearly tell which guy is speaking. Say, in a debate, when one guy is “pro” and the other guy is “anti.” Context tells you who’s who.
It also works when one guy has a unique manner of speech – but this requires a smooth and subtle touch. If one guy is speaking in a gross, broad Scots accent, it’s just cartoonish.
Lol, I would not mind getting robbed by such a robber.
Recently i have run across three books that within the first 20 pages subhuman characters are fighting by throwing balls of fire at each other. That!
You gotta stop reading those Dragonball Z books!
It doesn’t ‘ruin’ a book for me, but I always have to laugh when the detective is scoping out the houses of shady suspects. You can tell they are bad people because their yards are full of weeds, the glass of a window is cracked, and when the detective lets himself inside the house, it is inevitably dark, dirty, depressing, and badly decorated. (The ‘good’ people have flowers on the table; the ‘bad’ people have used underwear strewn about the floor.)
Here’s a nice piece on how to write intelligent characters.
Here he describes why he hates the scene where Tolkiens dwarves leave Bilbo at the ledge of Mount Doom:
A few things for me (and stuff I try hard to avoid in my own writing):
- Death/torture of animals (if you’re going to kill the hero’s cat and nail its corpse to his garage door to show him you mean business, tell me in advance and I just won’t read the book, k?)
- Too much description, especially when it pulls me out of the story (I hate reading along to be suddenly hit by a paragraph-long infodump about what the main character looks like, or three pages of description of the idyllic little town where he finds himself stranded)
- Overused cutesy devices (worst example I can think of: I love Chuck Palahniuk, but I couldn’t finish “Doomed” because everything was stupid internet jokes, like beginning all the chapters with “Gentle Tweeter,” and everything being “Ctrl + Alt + <something>” (like “Ctrl + Alt + words fail me”). Ugh.
- Too many weird adverbs of dialog tags (I particularly hate “retorted,” “shot back,” and “countered.”)
- Boringness! If the action isn’t moving along at a good clip, I put the book down. Life’s too short to read boring books.
The worst of all, though, is a book by one of my favorite authors. I love almost everything he’s written, but this one…ugh. It was fine until the end. The heroine had a bunch of bad things happen to her, dealt with them, and prevailed…and then on the last couple of pages, when she’s settled back in her apartment with her child, winding down, there’s a knock on the door. She opens it…and gets shot to death.
Uh…WTF??
After that, I wanted the time I’d invested in that book back. I considered it a huge betrayal on the author’s part. I have no idea what he was thinking.
Not sure what this means - depicting it too nicely?
I’m guessing it means “torture porn,” where it’s obvious that the author really gets off on describing horrific violence.
Getting basic geography wrong like confusing Cumberland, MD and Cumberland Gap, VA. Another example, having a character drive an hour out of DC on I66 and stopping at a rest area when the only ones are much closer to the city… David Baldacci in both cases. The latter would have been acceptable if it were rush hour.
Yep. A LOT of writers could gain from applying the rule that if the description doesn’t advance the plot, they should leave it out entirely, or at best, give a cursory description.
I mean, it’s one thing to describe the character as bailing out of the flaming plane over enemy territory, and another to describe the character as “pulling the handle of his Martin-Baker H-7 and being violently shot out of the cockpit of his McDonnell Douglas F4C, missing part of the tail with his VFA-102 insignia and part of the right wing, streaming flaming JP-5 and corkscrewing wildly as it plummeted to earth over North Vietnam”
Also, I’d say that sort of ‘‘description’’ isn’t really description at all, any more than writing ‘‘he was sad’’ is a compelling description of sadness.
Especially when they add detail that’s wrong: I was reading a book a little while ago and the author had an F-89 Scorpion attacking a Godzilla-like monster, only problem was the book was set in the early 2000’s and the F-89 was retired in the late 1960’s.
I can only imagine that the author or a friend had a quick look online for US fighter with a ‘cool’ sounding name and didn’t go much further than that.
This is a bit of a fine line, within the techno-thriller genre I like a lot of descriptions and technical detail.
The series improves a lot past the first few books, as does Dresden’s attitude. Although he does on occasion still get criticized by characters in-story for keeping things to himself and making the entire situation about him, usually without realizing it. It’s a character flaw, not bad writing.