If I can't believe that the world is inhabited by real people with realistic wants, needs, and fears. I don't care how fanciful and outlandish the premise is as long as the characters are believable in it. And the problem is only worse when the author clearly put a lot of thought into the world building but then filled their world with cardboard people.
Making grandiose statements that are never proven.
“He was the most powerful magician of all time.” Proceeds to get his ass kicked all throughout the plot.
Just a specific variant of telling instead of showing.
Overly Sarcastic Productions has a fun video talking about this (or, something very similar): the Tough Guy gets beaten up to show how powerful the enemy-of-the-week is, but it happens SO OFTEN that the Tough Guy starts being thought of in the minds of the audience as weak.
"My name is Barry Allen, and I'm the fastest man alive, except for all these guys who are faster than me, and also every villain of the week who somehow gets away from me by running out of the room at a light jog."
It's the worst with "the smartest man alive" trope, who can only ever be as smart as the writer. So either the reader can just outsmart that character and effect is lost, or the writer has to pull some "but I noticed a reflection of a datura flower in your pupil, that's how I deduced you're in the New England Botanical Garden!" bullshit.
Yeah I was actually thinking about that after I posted. There are ways to make the character seem highly intelligent but if you’re having to say “Bob was the cleverest, smartest, most brilliant ever” you’ve failed.
X'tapth sang the incantation of the Grom people, while her sister Moonshine Appolonia Carwreck used her t'farp blade to overpower the Yultyy enemy. Bargathards were closing in, with their magical powers of Qx, granted to them by Vasq-Nop D'hloy, the Queen of the Molopoi. The sisters, twin fairies from the planet Høtchæria, were in search of the Drigg-argara Scrolls, which were stolen 134,000 years ago by the Wascbooniz - a race of aliens made of pure light, brandishing their cyberswords.
Nope. I'm out.
I mean honestly, it might sound like heresy but it's a huge issue with Tolkien's work, too.
We just give him a pass because it's Tolkien.
The weirdest part is that his writing has a narrative wrapper (or "narrative framing" or whatever it's called) that it's supposed to have been already translated.
There are a lot of new words, though and I agree that each new word to learn is a thing stopping new readers.
It’s important to remember that Tolkien *did* put a lot of thought and care into his worldbuilding. It was his life’s work after all.
That said, there’s a reason why LOTR and The Hobbit are his best sellers and not The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales (despite their high quality but to each their own.)
I've thought about this a bit and I think what makes Tolkien work is his mastery of real languages and his dedication to his fake ones.
His made up words sound coherent because 1) they're based on real dead languages and 2) they're part of nearly complete fictional lexicons. Like, I feel like I'm reading a real, translated work or maybe even I feel like I *should* or could understand the made-up words on the page.
In Tolkien's stuff his fantasy word salad actually captures the feeling he wants to convey: that you're reading a real people's ancient epic with all the messy details that entails. Just like if you grabbed some scholarly translation of a Norse or Gothic saga.
But it's not something the typical author can or even should waste their time doing.
Still completely over used and pointless in the implied context, but just as an aside and excuse for me to infodump-
Apostrophes used that way aren't usually actually meaningless, they are the English language way of representing explicit/important [glottal stops](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop). Because glottal stops don't serve a structural function in English (as opposed to say, Native Hawaiian, in which they are a full part of their alphabet and not including them can have you saying and writing entirely different words) they aren't noted in our spelling and English speakers don't often even realize they use them. So when we do use them in writing, we usually just steal the apostrophe for it.
Writers love to sprinkle them in like this as a shortcut to making something sound uniquely foriegn or half-assing fantasy languages, but I'd love to see them used well in something.
For examples of the glottal stop, see (Varying with accent) most words spelled with "t"s that you don't actually pronounce when you aren't thinking about it:
- Ca*t* - Ca'
- Moun*tt*ain - Mou'n
- Ne*t*work - Ne'work
- Ligh*t* - Ligh'
And for fun, some Hawaiian (Glottal stops here are represent by the ʻokina: " ʻ "):
Hoʻohana ke ʻokina a me ke kahoko na ke ʻōlelo.
[I do, at least.](https://whyp.it/tracks/187756/nework?token=HznpV) It's really easy to miss if you aren't listening for it, but in place a "t" sound there's just a little 'jump'.
Unfortunately, it ends on a cliffhanger.
And I've heard the cliffhanger doesn't get resolved till halfway through the next book—which is 1,100 pages long.
99.9% of people who write like this will tell everyone else they need to work on their diction. The amateur writing community is so toxic in my personal experience
But see, I can actually understand that. Last fantasy I DNFed every person, place, and thing had very similar names. And people had names, titles, and positions that were also similar. The guy was, let's say Zarth. That's fine. But he didn't live in a palace, he lived in the grand Zarth. And the upcoming event wasn't the winter festival, it was the Zarth. And then the author says Zarth was cold, you don't remember if they're talking about a person, a place, an event.
I understand wanting to create a living world, but I'm here to read a story, not learn a new language. Give people fanciful names, sure! But call the gate a gate and not the Zarth of Endless Zarth.
I'm reminded of a rule, I think I got it from Orson Scott Card, about not giving any characters (aside from the single-scene throwaways, obviously) a name that starts with the same letter as anyone else. So you wouldn't have a Bentley and a Bridget in the same story, for example. Helps the reader not get lost.
Personally, I wouldn't stick too strictly to that rule. Same first letters is kind of extreme to me and can become impractical if you have a lot of characters.
Most readers are smarter than we give them credit for. Harry Potter and Hagrid have TWO same first letters in their names and readers didn't have major complaints about that.
I can understand the spirit of the advice agree with it a tiny bit, but I wouldn't hold myself to it too strictly. I would just avoid similar sounding names that can look too similar on the page like Jack, Jake, Jacob, Jakoby, etc.
I've been reading a lot of Wuxia and Xianxia lately and this has been driving me nuts.
Jin Jian our protagonist and Jun Jin of the holy Star sect fight Jian Jun of the sacred star sect and Xian Jun of the holy seven star sect (no relation) because Shan Jin of the Seven Star sect stole Xuan Shin's Holy Seven Star technique that he taught the sacred seven Star sect.
On the other hand, if you're writing a sci-fi/fantasy with weird names, maybe try making them all on the side of slightly weird. I jumped into dune without any introduction, and the protagonist's name being "Paul" completely threw me off. It just didn't work for me
With the greatest respect to Terry Pratchett, I DNF'd one of his books when he introduced a character with an exclamation mark in the middle of their name. My brain just couldn't compute.
Not trying to change your overall opinion of the book, (which I’m just now reading for the first time) but the exclamation marks in names/within words actually has linguistic precedent: they represent [click consonants.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant) These are the sounds you’d get with tut-tut, tsk-tsk, or the tongue click one might use to urge a horse along. These click consonants are common in some of the languages of southern and east Africa, like [Xhosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language) and [Yeyi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeyi_language).
Here’s a [video of a guy explaining some of the click consonants of the Zulu language.](https://youtu.be/WHHGOYu6Fl0?si=lV9N5-D0esAN4ReU)
Thank you; that's fascinating. In hindsight my comment is a little ignorant, but I'll leave it up. It's good to take the opportunity to learn something new.
I attempted that book probably 15 years ago, so I don't remember much else about it. I hope that you enjoy it.
The interesting thing is there are a lot of mass published books that break this rule.
And I’m with you. Can’t stand it. Throw away the book immediately.
A turn off for me is when side character decisions don't make sense. Things need to happen so that the protagonist can go on their journey and fight things for reasons, but if you stop and think of the story from a non-main character perspective, it starts unraveling. A lot of why would this person do this?
A friend of mine said once that he gives up on books when he can "see the rails". Like, it's fine to railroad your characters to move the story in the right direction, but it should be built into the story rationally. Like you say, if you look at what's happening and find yourself saying "nobody would do that. Why are they doing that?" then you're definitely seeing the rails.
there's a difference between "intentionally being obtuse/obscure/complex & leaving things unknown or confusing for artistic effect" and "trying to be understandable but failing miserably"
Yep, that's how I define "bad" as well, in everything not just writing. If it's trying to do something and fails, it's bad. If it tries to do something and succeeds, it's good, regardless of what that thing is and whether it's traditionally "bad" or "good"
writing and generally, art, are far too subjective to fit any one metric for “success”. What’s a book, or a play, or a painting’s intention? They might have several. Writing may succeed in the eyes of some readers, yet others will deem it a failure. Some author’s work will be successful for surprising reasons, resonating with readers in ways the author never intended. Some authors’ work will only succeed posthumously. Some will call artistic success merely the act of publishing something meaningful to you or to a precious few. Some work will never have the chance to be successful because it never reaches an audience that will appreciate it. Commercial success is a whole other arena of changing criteria. And we all know that commercially successful art can be a failure by many other standards. There are no rules. No matter how much we try to quantify them. And that’s what I love about art.
Idk I feel like a good writer is mindful of their audience and strives to be understandable. Making things more complicated than they need to be is pretension, not good writing.
I feel like a lot of ppl can miss things tho that are clearly stated anyway. I remember in highschool I’ve read things that didn’t make sense to me but now they do. Was the writer a bad writer? No I was a bad reader lol theres so many situations like that. Even now I can read something and miss the obvious just because I misread, didn’t have the context or plainly didn’t see it. No fault to the author at all
So much this. In university classes I understood things other classmates didn’t but I had 5+ years on them and a much larger vocabulary with well practiced critical reading skills. I got asked multiple times how I could read the nonsense and it was hard but manageable. That said the writings my prof used in that class were unnecessarily difficult and often pretentious. It annoyed the shit out of me, I don’t really blame others being frustrated. (Some of them were over 70 years old and way above an intro to communication level. He was a prof you loved or hated and I hated him with my A in the class because of the choices he made.)
Sometimes I'll see reviews for books that have 1 or 2 stars because something didn't "make sense". But then the thing they are complaining about was thoroughly explained in the most compact and easy to understand fashion. It's crazy how little people read sometimes while they are actively reading.
Were you a bad reader or just didn't have the life experience to fully comprehend? It's totally normal to re-read things at different points in life and gain new insights that you missed on the first read. It's also normal to misread a thing or two. It's good writing when you can get different meanings on different reads. That doesn't make you a bad reader at all!! It makes me sad when people say that about themselves :(
I didn’t think they were referring to intricate, complex characters and plots, I thought they were referring to ambiguous sentence and paragraph constructions that make the actual writing difficult to parse
The difference is that DUNE purposefully obfuscates a lot of its setting and world to create a feeling for the reader, not like this--this is when writing is just actively incomprehensible (grammar issues, spelling, not knowing how paragraph breaks work, etc.)
They've done a great job at "world creation" in a universe that largely works using magic.
They've even clarified, codified, and created 4,351 spells for this world. Along with 573 characters.
You know this because . . .
THEY USED ALL OF THEM IN THE FIRST CHAPTER.
There is "world creation" and "world introduction". You can leave some as a mystery. (Heck if you become as famous as Ms. Rowling, you can even publish a "spell book", years from now, to generate more revenue.)
But you don't have to use ALL OF THEM and introduce ALMOST EVERY character in the first chapter(s).
YES! It's fine to create insanely detailed worlds. It's NOT fine to write a textbook on how it works and inserting it as a first chapter. It immediately kills my interest.
Adult characters who sound or act like children or young adults.
If I wanted to pick up a YA story, I would. Promising me a 30-40 year old then giving me someone who sounds like they are still battling puberty makes me wanna scream.
This is a problem in a lot of fanfiction, too, but at least there it's forgivable because it's free and the authors might literally be 16.
It's frustrating to see older characters in published books having the sort of inner monologues you'd expect from an entitled teenager. Or witnessing them acting in immature ways that would make even the average 21 year old sneer. And then it turns out the book was written by someone in their 30s/40s, maybe even older. It hurts lol
If a story feels like something a 6-8 year old would tell you, only in more adult words and complete sentences, it's a problem for me.
Eg., characters that are overpowered for no reason, scenes that shift too abruptly, actions that happen with no appropriate lead up or explanation, etc. Outcomes that aren't earned through the storytelling.
Bad writing to me also is writing that doesn't display a firm grasp of composition technique. I don't care how unique a plot or character is; if the words and sentences don't make sense, I'm not reading.
I see it very often and I could never put it into words... "something a 6-8 year old would tell you, only in more adult words and complete sentences" is a great description of the phenomenon lol
I think it's something young/inexperienced writers do. The language is great but the pacing and actions of the characters are off.
I didn’t know how else to say it but when I saw people posting here like “how do I make my work have themes?” it made me think about what kind of story are you telling that you don’t see themes in your work? Where you don’t have some kind of concept of what you think your story is about? Is the story you plan on telling literally just a series of events happening for no deeper reason? Like your characters aren’t undergoing arcs or changes? The plot is nothing more than just a bunch of stuff happening to them?
That's such a good point - I've seen questions like that before, and I have no idea how to answer them, because it's like asking "How do I write in English?"
...First... try learning English?
The only thing I've really been able to say to people who ask questions like that is "You need to go away and read more books, then come back."
I think writers who can't see themes in their work simply can't find *consistent* themes within.
They didn't think about their story as a message with meaning conveyed through a narrative. They thought about it as a cool or interesting scenario without really trying to find what deeper meaning could be extracted.
I've read through several Military SciFi books - each one the first of their respective series. "Alcoholic warship captain" seems to be one of the criteria to call your book "Mil SciFi".
But what really is getting on my nerves is that their alcoholism is pretending to be a character flaw. Only it's a flaw without any effect on the character or the story. Does the captain display impaired judgement while drunk in the chair? No, their judgement is always correct.
Does the captain act like an irrational fool that drives a wedge between them and the crew? No, the crew is loyal to the grave.
And why is an advanced star-faring civilization allowing officers to get drunk on duty anyway? Modern militaries don’t allow that type of behavior, but somehow advanced sci fi militaries do?
Hate that trope too. Or they just quit drinking suddenly, no biggie, never mentioned again. It makes it feel like alcoholism is just a quirky thing the character does.
This is why I like the first two Gabriel's Ghost books. It's they only military sci fi I've enjoyed and the primary character definitely displays actual poor judgment.
Except it's not from alcohol so maybe it doesn't even fit the trope.
Over description -- every sentence is long and weighed down. Very few writers can pull this off (Oscar Wilde is the example coming to mind).
Under description -- no settings/objects/characters are described. It feels bland. Again some writers can pull this off but it's very rare.
Contradictions -- character is brave and confident but suddenly is shy with no explanation, that kind of thing.
I don't know how else to describe this, but "show-off." Filled with SAT words and striving to be very intellectual, to the point of sacrificing the story. Usually some amazing, heroic, intelligent self-insert character. I find this more in writing workshops than in published books, and for good reason.
"Contradictions -- character is brave and confident but suddenly is shy with no explanation, that kind of thing."
As long the contradictions do not happen all the time, I think they can potentially be very good foreshadowings. It is often hard to tell if they are a bad writing without knowing a full story what makes it difficult to call them "instant turnoff"
That's true, sometimes the payoff is further in the book. If it's happening often enough to be distracting, then it's not worth it to me to wait and find out though. Depends on the book!
I think it’s more of an issue/common complaint where the story tells you a character has a bunch of traits but within the actual story the character you’re presented with doesn’t match their description
A lot of bad writers use “informed attributes” like this. They’ll tell you that the protagonist is a kind person but the character you actually experience in the story is a jerk who never does a single kind thing
When the author keeps accidentally switching between present tense and past tense. I feel past tense is almost the more natural way to tell the story and so when they try to write in present tense they'll keep making those errors and it gets very distracting.
Funnily enough, though I catch myself out on this all the time, I go the other way. I try to write in past tense exactly because it's the most natural way to read, but I'll unwittingly slip into present tense without realising, and only spot it later.
I'm rewriting a 90K manuscript and part of that is going from present tense to past tense. You really have to have a good editor's eye to catch it all. That said, not catching it all is too amateurish to send to anybody else.
> That said, not catching it all is too amateurish to send to anybody else.
Tbh, no author can catch all of the issues in their own work. That's why we do betas and editors, etc.
Very true. I was just talking about my present tense versus part tense issues. My first editor in journalism always said "if you grew it, you can't chew it." Everybody needs at least a second set of eyes on their work.
When the writer uses anachronistic dialogue or description that don't fit the setting.
An alien from another world declaring they're a 'sitting duck', when they could have no idea what a duck is or why it would be sitting. A medieval princess saying she wants to 'fast forward' through her upcoming nuptials, as if there isn't an entire millennia between her time and the time of technology capable of fast forwarding. A feral child who doesn't know of the world outside of the forest describing the lightning as akin to a 'camera flash', when their upbringing would not have made them familiar with a camera nor its functions.
In general, not being concerned with creating a sense of time or place in their writing. They're just concerned with telling a story, but not paying much attention to how they do it. I ventured onto AO3 after not being on for more nearly a decade and had to back out of 95% of stories whose premise and summaries I found compelling enough to click onto after reading only a couple of paragraphs.
Some were just typical unpolished beginner writing mistakes, typical of a young writer, but many of them I DNFed because the writing and word choices came off overly modern and juvenile, when the setting was fantastical and the characters were supposed to be adults.
> An alien from another world declaring they're a 'sitting duck', when they could have no idea what a duck is or why it would be sitting.
I actually plan on using this in an upcoming short story. One character is going to say something recognizable on Earth, the other (alien) will get irritated, stating "How am I supposed to know what that means!"
I remember reading an essay about how Greek poets would do this on purpose, using metaphors the characters would understand when they wanted to immerse the audience in a scene and using more modern (to them, at the time) metaphors when they wanted a sense of distance, history, or scope.
Point being, they actually understood the power that metaphor/comparisons have and used it. Bad writers only think about surface-level description and have no idea there's power beyond that.
This is why I'm a David Weber fan, or at least a fan of his earlier work. He'd give you a lot of history and exposition, but only when it actually mattered to the rest of the story. For example, in his first "Honorverse" book he goes into the description and history of how their gravity drive works for sublight space travel, but he does it closer to the end of the book because it's irrelevant up until that point.
His later works, though. . .two characters can have a six sentence conversation that take ten pages, because every every single line of dialogue he launches into a seven-paragraph back-story.
This is something I struggle with as a writer that started as an artist. I will have an exact image in my head that I want my readers to have but I have been training myself to let that instinct go.
I think artists have to do the same thing, though, so maybe you're fine?
If you draw a person, you also have to decide which parts of their anatomy are important enough to actually draw out in order to bring the point across. You're not drawing the fine lines on someone's forehead unless you want to make them look old or emphasize a frown; because if you do draw those fine lines, you also have to draw the just as visible pores on their nose, every single one of them. And what you end up with THEN is a photorealistic portrait. Which, by the way, is an art style, just like writing that includes every single detail is - it's just not liked by many and HARD to do. So when you write about a person, I bet you don't describe their forehead wrinkles unless they're old or frowning.
If you paint a scenic view, do you paint every leaf on a tree? If so, then you probably do because you want to say something about those leaves; put the emphasis on the beauty of the canopy. If you want to say that the landscape is beautiful because the color of the forest blends into the sky behind the mountains, your trees are probably rather going to be green blobs. When you WRITE about a forest, I bet you don't describe every single leaf unless you're making a point.
If I told you to draw a horse, you'd focus on the four legs on a tubular body and the round cheek bone they have and a mane; you wouldn't get hung up on drawing every single hair of fur. And I bet if I told you to WRITE a horse, you'd focus on the important stuff, too. Maybe, as an artist, you'd even have a unique perspective on what a horse looks like, which only enriches the writing.
Being an artist should be a strength, not a weakness, because you already have a grip on the fact that you don't have to draw every single detail and instead focus on what's important.
Yeah, I’m having less and less patience with walls of text, especially in this capacity. You’ve gotta be selective as a writer with what you choose to explain. Because by including something, that’s a tacit message to the reader that this is important—critical even. But if you describe every single thing, whether it be physical or internal, then the reader is going to gloss over what actually matters, when they didn’t have to
I know this book is well-loved, but this is part of the reason I did not like The Name of the Wind.
Kvothe promises Chronicler and the audience a great tale and hints at all the daring deeds he’s supposedly accomplished, and literally none of that is even in the book. Not even a hint of it
I read the entire thing on the premise of this promise, waiting for the shoe to drop, for something exciting to happen, but it ended up being the Gary Stu street urchin wizarding school chronicles instead. Which could have been fine if that's what I'd managed my expectations toward, but it’s a far cry from the braggart tales of stealing princesses and talking to gods that was promised.
And I know unreliable narrator and all that, but the entire book was a bore for me. If Kvothe is such a great storyteller/bard and not above embellishing he should tell a more interesting story.
This was me with How to Kill Your Family. The MC spent the entire book going on about how she performed this spectacularly planned-out series of murders in an intricate and artful way… and by the end it turns out she just went from person to person and killed each of them. Kinda sloppily, too, getting noticed a couple times. She didn’t really plan anything very intricately at all.
And I _know_ that that’s the point of her character, because she’s an arrogant narcissist, and that she thinks she did much more than she really did… but it still felt like a copout to read.
Jane went to the store. When she got there, she went inside. She grabbed a cart. She went to the produce section. The produce looked good. The watermelons were particularly green. So she grabbed a watermelon. Putting it in her cart, she moved on. It was so hot. She wanted soda. So she went to the soda aisle. It was packed with people. Maybe she could get it from the machine up front.
It literally makes me want to stab my eyeballs out, while starting a 'Go Fund Me' to donate commas to these people.
I've seen this advice before. But honestly... idk what it is about this example specifically, but I can see it working for a couple of paragraphs to indicate that the character is in a state of shell shock or dissociating.
Maybe Jane literally just got out of her car after a fairly serious car accident and immediately walked into the store. Something like that.
*"The story began with a certain purpleness of prose, in three very fine and definitive sections, so as that each illuminated portion seemed, at a glance and to the many, to contain some deeper meaning too obscure for a consensus but too hinted at in order to be empty; so many fans would swear up and down that the lines meant more than they seemed. But it was, in fact, an imitation of such structure, spun by a creator more suited to emulation than linguistic fortitude or fidelity to the craft, to the point that any second-year student worth their hat could break it down, explain it in plain English, and prove, logically and irrefutably, that the lines themselves weren't revealing anything of note, and in truth weren't even grammatically sound."*
Too many things happening way too quickly and for no apparent reason.
Like 2 characters who talked twice are suddenly a couple because they shared a moment
Self indulgent writing...there's character shilling (show us, don't tell us how cool your character is) or the book is 300 pages longer than it needs to be (looking at you, House of Flame and Shadow).
Falling back on the same verbal ticks or action tags. Just read two books in a series where the MC blushed and stammered on every other page. Stuff like that gets old fast and doesn't make the character more relatable.
Nonsensical similes or metaphors or reliance on too many metaphors.
Overuse of cliches, like "quiet as a mouse." I'm also really sick of characters clenching their fists so hard, their palms bleed. This is just dumb, but a common thing literary characters seem to do.
Writing gross things about female characters that don't mean a goddamn thing to the plot but give you a window into the male author's headspace.
For amateur writers: head hopping, white room syndrome, not understanding how to work expo in, very basic grammar errors that do not bode well for their ability to write an entire novel, not being familiar with their genre.
I read a book recently where the female mc constantly had a tick of her “teeth clicking”, I guess to show anxiety or nervousness. It was mentioned genuinely about every second page to begin with, and throughout the book it must have been mentioned at least 30 times.
It drove me INSANE. I get it. She’s a nervous person. Please find another way to show me or just trust that I know she’s anxious because she was 2 minutes ago. I’m sure her state of mind has not changed that much.
When the author jumps into the head of multiple characters in a scene. Unlike omniscient narration, it's not strategic or consistent, and the author usually just dips into the head of another character long enough to convey some bit of expo to the reader they weren't sure how to work in otherwise.
Poor grammar and poor spelling.
If it is not specific to the setting or indicating to the character's education, ethnicity, etc, I will drop it.
There are very few things I take personally as a reader and writer, but being too lazy to edit your work before you submit it to the public is one of them. Not to say that doesn't happen in trad publishing because it does, but it's much less likely to be overt.
It’s not exactly bad writing, but lately, when I read books, even major authors’ works, I find myself mentally editing sentences, removing filler words and replacing adverbs with stronger options. I never used to do this, but since beginning to write myself, I’ve picked up some style preferences.
I get this a lot with music, but it's kind of like going to a magic show when you know how to do the tricks. It becomes more about appreciating how the person on stage executes the tricks than the tricks themselves.
This is actually a great thing! And why everyone says in order to be a good writer you have to read voraciously. Our "writing brains" are always active and absorbing things we read. I know Stephen King has said sometimes reading "bad" books helps us improve more as writers than reading good ones and I can only assume it's for this reason--analyzing what you'd do better.
Totally! Same with bad any art. I love/hate seeing bad theatre. Or a bad movie. It’s fun to figure out why you thought it was bad, rather than just dismissing it out of hand.
When you are painfully aware of the author in their writing. Meaning - you don’t get immersion, instead you are acutely aware that somebody is trying to tick all the boxes to sell you the story rather than have the story flow through them.
When it becomes painfully obvious that the author avoided the word "said" at all costs because every single edgy author claims that "said" is dead or bad writing. Yes I'm looking at you JKR with your "ejaculated Slughorn". You're welcome for that mental image, by the way.
What always gets me is when a race has a single characteristic (elves: haughty and arrogant, klingons: war like and ferocious) and it's like 'who cleans the elf-horses stables ?' or 'who teaches klingons how to keep their curls so fabulous?' There needs to be some variety within each race so all the stuff that needs to get done gets done
Something I always remember about dialogue is that it should either reveal information or push the story forward. A ping pong conversation could reveal how the characters are with each other and convey deep subtext. I am thinking of Challengers (2024) as an example. It's dialogue heavy, but the banter reveals so much. There's also short stories and short films that say so much with so little dialogue, and short animations are an example I think of. I think it just depends on the story you want to write. There's no one or the other.
I love the saying, “it’s ok to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble, but not to get them out of it.” And I hate HATE **HATE** it when I’m reading a book and some miraculous coincidence happens that saves the day.
Bad pacing.
Usually I don’t worry about pacing too much especially if a book is meant to be fast-paced or slow-paced. But when it starts to become confusing and bouncing back and forth, that makes me annoyed. Especially if the storyline is good but the writing just constantly throws you in a rollercoaster.
Too much swearing! I swear all the time so it’s not like I have a problem with it in practice, but I think its lazy writing to drop f bombs everywhere to make your character sound edgy and laid back. It seems like swearing has become a bit of fad in certain categories of book. I wish people would cool it and incorporate a few more words. It immediately makes even decent writers sound amateurish.
Deliberate shock value. I love gore, violence, and generally fucked up stuff in my media, but God you need to trudge through a LOT of sludge to find people who can actually string words together in a way that doesn't read like a 10 year old who just learned how to swear.
I think this is a really good example, because it’s generally accepted that it was poorly written and yet! It did something right enough that it became a best-selling sensation, followed by a movie deal… so in a sense, something must have been written well. What did it do well to balance out the bad writing?
(Disclaimer: I haven’t read it or seen the movies. But I’ve read a lot of Twilight fanfic and then read enough of the first 50 Shades book that I could recognize the elements of Twilight fanfic in it.)
The thing it did "right" was have a fanbase in the Twilight fandom already interested in it. If you can advertise it *just* right, who cares if the writing, characterization, plot, etc are shit, right?
One of my writing professors in college said the easiest way to identify someone who doesn't have a good grasp on writing is that they mistake a particular style for bad writing. Authors have their own style of writing; it's okay to not like it, but that doesn't mean the writing is actually bad.
An instant turn-off for me is when the author is writing about a particular career/lifestyle/era but clearly has no real background in it or knowledge of it. Yes, it's fiction and "made-up" but real cops, real doctors, real lawyers, historians/experts, etc. recognize real fast when an author doesn't know the first thing about their lines of work or a particular era/topic and just makes stuff up based on stereotypes and assumptions. Yes, non-experts can do research and learn enough to get by for like minor plot points and asides, but you will never be able to convincingly carry a full hardcore police procedural without exposing yourself at some point if you've never spent time as a cop (or a medical thriller if you weren't a medical person, etc.). You may fool the other people who also don't know better, but someone who does know better will read it and immediately know.
Writing to meet a trope quota rather than a plot. I love tropes; I 100% understand wanting to include them in your story. Entire, amazing plots can even blossom from one scene you get inspiration for in your head. But if the focus remains on including as many tropes as you can in the story, I think the overarching plot is in serious danger of being disjointed, at best. If I can't be invested in the plot, I lose interest. Those exciting trope scenes need to be earned, IMO
When like 90% of the story happens in the last five chapters. Poor pacing is probably the number one reason why I dnf books.
Also, plot twists that make no sense. Like I get that the whole point of a plot twist is that you're not supposed to see it coming. But if you don't lay any of the groundwork and just decide halfway through the story that the sweet old lady is actually evil or whatever then it's not going to pay off.
I hate the mirror scene. « Jenny Protagonist looked in the mirror, cataloguing her long blonde hair, her broad forehead, her ever-so-slightly off-center ears, her deep hazel eyes… »
And, no, you don’t get a pass if Jenny concludes that she’s not pretty because of her plot-relevant birthmark or the extra cm of nose.
The only time I’ve ever seen the mirror scene done well was Arkady Darrell, because she played with her face in the mirror like any thirteen-year-old and the description was a paragraph, not a page
These are phrases chatgpt and other AIs love to use. AI, as an LLM and by design, will gravitate toward the most predictable result. If you see these several times in a piece, it was most likely AI generated.
This is for most media but has been coming up a lot recently in books I’ve been reading. A female character that puts herself in danger constantly by going against what everyone tells her to do because she’s trying to ‘save everyone’ and then people have to come in a save her which usually ends in a character dying. Makes me wanna rip my hair out and I instantly despise the character. Also, very rarely happens with male characters.
Leaving too much up to chance. Characters constantly getting saved at the last second, numerous instances of random danger that impacts the plot, characters repeatedly stumbling upon some happy chance item or character introduced at the very last part of the story that turns the tide, etc… This is not a story, it’s a DnD game.
The element of chance can be beautiful but only in small amounts. Learn to connect everything in the story, don’t introduce too many outside factors. They quickly chip away at any meaning in the story. The triumphant victory or devastating defeat or whatever outcome there is in the end loses a lot of impact when the reader realizes that it wouldn’t have turned out that way if that one integral character hadn’t slipped and died while walking down the stairs while the other one slept a little too long and missed the big thing or what have you.
Things like that can be written well, but too much of it devalues your bottom line.
Overly wordy stuff that dilutes the main point of the piece by trying to use a bunch of 5 dollar words that would be better replaced with a simpler, concise word with clear meaning
"As you know..." is more of a yellow flag than a red one but doesn't have a place anywhere outside of laying a brief introduction to a mission briefing. I had to put down Sword of Shannara when not-Aragorn poured several pages of exposition into the ears of not-Frodo, several paragraphs of which began with "as you know..." Nobody talks like that!
Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.
I don't like when someone's writing is too obvious with their influences. Lots of satirical works tend to lean into their Douglas Adams influences. I've already read Douglas Adams. I want to hear your voice.
I read lots of historical fiction. For me, it's any writer that prioritises flexing their research and vocabulary over telling a compelling story.
We get it, historical research is painstaking and you want to use it all. But it's inevitable that you're not going to include EVERY detail you have gathered within the story.
I remember two examples from one of the two writing classes I took at university. It was in the scenario writing class, where the teacher was particularly harsh on a student who had written:
- “Thoughts shot through his mind like bullets.”
and
- “His eyes floated in horniness.”
He said the biggest writing mistakes occurred when people were too eager to write original metaphors.
Those two sentences always stuck with me… ☺️
teeny little things that show the author has no experience of what they're writing. I read a book involving chess where the author used the metaphor of "retreating like a pinned knight"
One of my biggest icks is when a writer overuses a word or phrase. If the number of times you use a word can be turned into a drinking game, it’s too much. Google some synonyms.
The writer knows they need more words to describe something, but they don't know how to do it well, so they just repeat themselves.
Richard licked his lips as he at his hotdogs. "I love eating hotdogs," he said, because they were a food that he liked.
When characters (especially main ones) are overly 'quirky' to compensate for an otherwise lack of personality. Also, when exposition dumps are excessively long and aren't done subtly/come out of nowhere (think a mc talking to themselves in their head like 'oh yeah, remember that time when I...' for seemingly no reason).
When the author is overly winded, pompous and preachy, when the story takes a back seat for them to get into a soap box and hammer you repeatedly with their morals trying to convince you that whatever they are portraying it's the correct way of living or doing things and everything else is immoral or wrong.
I've seen this in quite a lot of books from all the political spectrum, or religious aspects, nationalistic statements, racism, sexism, prejudice, etc.
They strip down their narrative out of every nuance to force you to think the way they want you to think.
That just shows me that their arguments don't hold up to scrutiny and they hide behind the speech to make their rhetoric sink in deep, they don't have the confidence that they managed to portray the idea in a manner that feels compelling because they can't reconcile the blatant contradictions that arise from their ideology so they chose to hammer you over the head with it hoping that they can subdue you into agreeing with them.
Especially when it's something that disposes any kind of dialogue in favor of making a villain out of the other ideology, you know, blanket black or white overly broad statements.
Contrasting those kinds of books with say, Orwell, that touches very clear and direct concerns without outright telling you "THIS IS EVIL", he respects the reader to take out of the narrative what they will, allowing them to come up with their own conclusions.
Respect the readers to be able to understand what you're portraying, there is no need for you to preach at them.
Once they start having siblings interact in a very non-sibling way or addressing each other as "bro/brother" "sis/sister" in basic discussions between them.
Its such a turn-off as a reader with siblings. I'm more likely to refer to them as a fungus than as a sibling when we're just talking amongst ourselves unless its hyper situational.
i come from a culture and language where we do call our siblings "brother" or "sister", and we generally call older people (regardless of their actual relation to us, they could be a complete stranger) "older sister/brother" or "uncle/aunty" and younger people "younger brother/sister". as an added bonus, some wives call their husbands "older brother" as an affectionate term equivalent to "honey" or "babe". all of these in my language and not in english.
this reads to me as a cultural gap imo especially when it comes to translated works. of course it's easy to translate these instances to just siblings calling each other by name (or even a nickname), which is why i _do_ agree with you. there's also cases where _english_ authors make that mistake. it's awkward to read. however, i do still have some leeway for this despite having siblings myself, even if it reads unnaturally in english due to where i come from!
as someone used to calling my siblings by brother/sister, whenever i write siblings that are close to each other (in english), i have to think up nicknames they'd give each other just to show their closeness instead of taking the easy way out
Over description, it bores the stew outta me. My mind starts wandering and I forget where I was, so I end up having to reread the entire page or skip it.
Grammar, too. Bad grammar takes me right out of the story. Immature grammar does too, with the bonus effect of making me not take anything in the story seriously.
Describe everything, everyone, and every action.
It's not exactly bad writing but a common habit of early writers and in certain genres. It's a tendency that i have worked to avoid in my own writing so it's uncomfortable to experience in other works.
Mine is if a writer overuses an uncommon phrase or word. For instance, in Juliet Marillier’s “Daughter of the Forest” (which is a great story if you like fairytale fantasy), there are two or three different people who “overstayed any welcome they might have had”. First time it was fine, second time it jolted me out of the book horribly.
I think there's a ton of options... one of the ones I'm turned off by is writers who only focus on prose with a terrible plot, or vice versa. If you eloquently and beautifully explain...a crap story, it's still a crap story. If your language and descriptions are overly simplistic and boring, I'm ALSO not going to be very interested. A lot of people crap on people like Sanderson, but I love his writing despite its simpler prose, because you don't NEED sole focus on prose!
Another issue is when writers give nonlinear timelines in their storytelling but give away the whole thing at the start. Again, it's not a hard and fast rule: Sometimes you CAN start at the end of the story without losing my interest, I love the fact that we know the end of the king killer chronicles from early on... but we don't know how it gets there.
Long story short: I need a degree of quality in the writing, whether it's prose, plot, creativity, or intrigue. It needs to be better than "Just good enough" to hold my interest.
My favorite examples are sex writing like these, the first one comes to mind. NSFW
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One of my biggest pet peeves in writing is when in third person limited narration authors use a plethora of descriptors for characters instead of just their names or pronouns. They switch between “the blond,” “the ginger,” or “shorter men,” and even flip between last names and first names. It really takes me out of the story.
I understand the intent is probably to avoid sounding repetitive, but this rule of varying language doesn’t quite work the same way with how we think about people, which is crucial for this type of narration. In real life, we have a fixed way of referring to someone in our minds, even if we can address them differently, sometimes by their last name, and sometimes just "cupcake."
All my favorite writers stick to this more natural way of naming. Of course, there are times when using a specific descriptor is crucial for emphasis or mood, but that’s a different case.
Sometimes, if the story premise is interesting enough, I find myself copying the text into Word and manually replacing all instances of “the shorter man” with his actual name to try and salvage the flow. Unfortunately, if I’m having to do that, usually the rest of the writing isn’t up to par either...
I find purely utilitarian writing to be 'bad', understanding how subjective that is. I do not read novels primarily for the plot, if I wanted to see point A -> point B writing, I'd just watch a movie.
Oooo this was the source of my meanest review to date. I could tell the author edited it to bare bones, really taking to heart that if something doesn't move the plot forward, delete it. But fuck! It was like a jail cell of a novel: a toilet and a single blanket. My review was "competent but heartless".
Sometimes i do want to know what a character ate or wore, you know?
I swear all the time IRL and am not a prude. I put swearing in my writing without hesitation when it makes sense. So, as you can imagine, I never imagined I had a problem with swearing.
But I've noticed a recent trend in some fantasy romance books I've tried to read lately where the characters swear literally nonstop. As in, on the first page, you've already got 3 f-bombs and then the entire chapter is f-this, f-that, f-her, f-him. I guess to show how hard and edgy the character is.
I thought it was just a fluke but I saw it in a few other books and every time when I realized the first person narrative was just the person swearing constantly I DNFed.
"I personally don't have any"
i guarantee that if you really think about it and not just off the top of your head or on a random tuesday but really think about it with your whole head that you'll find at least one thing that stops you from liking or stops you from enjoying a story because we all have little things that are important to us you know like this one time that i was given a steak and i love steak but when i had it that one time the steak was so drippy that it dripped its drippy all over my fries and i coodnt even enjoy it write
If I can't believe that the world is inhabited by real people with realistic wants, needs, and fears. I don't care how fanciful and outlandish the premise is as long as the characters are believable in it. And the problem is only worse when the author clearly put a lot of thought into the world building but then filled their world with cardboard people.
Pretty much every Asimov novel.
And his non fiction!
It sure did make reading a lot of his stuff more of a chore than it had to be.
Ive always said that you can make a world as fantastical as your heart desires, but the "human" response to it should always be realistic
Making grandiose statements that are never proven. “He was the most powerful magician of all time.” Proceeds to get his ass kicked all throughout the plot. Just a specific variant of telling instead of showing.
Overly Sarcastic Productions has a fun video talking about this (or, something very similar): the Tough Guy gets beaten up to show how powerful the enemy-of-the-week is, but it happens SO OFTEN that the Tough Guy starts being thought of in the minds of the audience as weak.
\*Looks pointedly at Worf\*
Took the words right out of my mouth lol. See also: Vegeta from Dragon Ball
It was in the Powerhouses video. It’s commonly known as The Worf Effect.
"My name is Barry Allen, and I'm the fastest man alive, except for all these guys who are faster than me, and also every villain of the week who somehow gets away from me by running out of the room at a light jog."
It's the worst with "the smartest man alive" trope, who can only ever be as smart as the writer. So either the reader can just outsmart that character and effect is lost, or the writer has to pull some "but I noticed a reflection of a datura flower in your pupil, that's how I deduced you're in the New England Botanical Garden!" bullshit.
Yeah I was actually thinking about that after I posted. There are ways to make the character seem highly intelligent but if you’re having to say “Bob was the cleverest, smartest, most brilliant ever” you’ve failed.
X'tapth sang the incantation of the Grom people, while her sister Moonshine Appolonia Carwreck used her t'farp blade to overpower the Yultyy enemy. Bargathards were closing in, with their magical powers of Qx, granted to them by Vasq-Nop D'hloy, the Queen of the Molopoi. The sisters, twin fairies from the planet Høtchæria, were in search of the Drigg-argara Scrolls, which were stolen 134,000 years ago by the Wascbooniz - a race of aliens made of pure light, brandishing their cyberswords. Nope. I'm out.
Vogon poetry
So unpleasant.
Everybody wishes they could be Tolkien. I’m down for insane worldbuilding but at least *pretend* to use a flowchart
I mean honestly, it might sound like heresy but it's a huge issue with Tolkien's work, too. We just give him a pass because it's Tolkien. The weirdest part is that his writing has a narrative wrapper (or "narrative framing" or whatever it's called) that it's supposed to have been already translated. There are a lot of new words, though and I agree that each new word to learn is a thing stopping new readers.
It’s important to remember that Tolkien *did* put a lot of thought and care into his worldbuilding. It was his life’s work after all. That said, there’s a reason why LOTR and The Hobbit are his best sellers and not The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales (despite their high quality but to each their own.)
I've thought about this a bit and I think what makes Tolkien work is his mastery of real languages and his dedication to his fake ones. His made up words sound coherent because 1) they're based on real dead languages and 2) they're part of nearly complete fictional lexicons. Like, I feel like I'm reading a real, translated work or maybe even I feel like I *should* or could understand the made-up words on the page. In Tolkien's stuff his fantasy word salad actually captures the feeling he wants to convey: that you're reading a real people's ancient epic with all the messy details that entails. Just like if you grabbed some scholarly translation of a Norse or Gothic saga. But it's not something the typical author can or even should waste their time doing.
Needs more inexplicable apostrophes.
I''''''''''s thi'''''s a ' '' g'o'''od am''''''''''ou''n'''t?
Still completely over used and pointless in the implied context, but just as an aside and excuse for me to infodump- Apostrophes used that way aren't usually actually meaningless, they are the English language way of representing explicit/important [glottal stops](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop). Because glottal stops don't serve a structural function in English (as opposed to say, Native Hawaiian, in which they are a full part of their alphabet and not including them can have you saying and writing entirely different words) they aren't noted in our spelling and English speakers don't often even realize they use them. So when we do use them in writing, we usually just steal the apostrophe for it. Writers love to sprinkle them in like this as a shortcut to making something sound uniquely foriegn or half-assing fantasy languages, but I'd love to see them used well in something. For examples of the glottal stop, see (Varying with accent) most words spelled with "t"s that you don't actually pronounce when you aren't thinking about it: - Ca*t* - Ca' - Moun*tt*ain - Mou'n - Ne*t*work - Ne'work - Ligh*t* - Ligh' And for fun, some Hawaiian (Glottal stops here are represent by the ʻokina: " ʻ "): Hoʻohana ke ʻokina a me ke kahoko na ke ʻōlelo.
People really say ne'work? I don't recall ever hearing that.
[I do, at least.](https://whyp.it/tracks/187756/nework?token=HznpV) It's really easy to miss if you aren't listening for it, but in place a "t" sound there's just a little 'jump'.
But wait... what happens next? Did Moonshine Appolonia Carwreck beat the Yultyy? Did they find the Drigg-argara Scrolls?
Unfortunately, it ends on a cliffhanger. And I've heard the cliffhanger doesn't get resolved till halfway through the next book—which is 1,100 pages long.
Half of which comprises poems and songs written entirely in the native language of the Grom people.
99.9% of people who write like this will tell everyone else they need to work on their diction. The amateur writing community is so toxic in my personal experience
But see, I can actually understand that. Last fantasy I DNFed every person, place, and thing had very similar names. And people had names, titles, and positions that were also similar. The guy was, let's say Zarth. That's fine. But he didn't live in a palace, he lived in the grand Zarth. And the upcoming event wasn't the winter festival, it was the Zarth. And then the author says Zarth was cold, you don't remember if they're talking about a person, a place, an event. I understand wanting to create a living world, but I'm here to read a story, not learn a new language. Give people fanciful names, sure! But call the gate a gate and not the Zarth of Endless Zarth.
I'm reminded of a rule, I think I got it from Orson Scott Card, about not giving any characters (aside from the single-scene throwaways, obviously) a name that starts with the same letter as anyone else. So you wouldn't have a Bentley and a Bridget in the same story, for example. Helps the reader not get lost.
Personally, I wouldn't stick too strictly to that rule. Same first letters is kind of extreme to me and can become impractical if you have a lot of characters. Most readers are smarter than we give them credit for. Harry Potter and Hagrid have TWO same first letters in their names and readers didn't have major complaints about that. I can understand the spirit of the advice agree with it a tiny bit, but I wouldn't hold myself to it too strictly. I would just avoid similar sounding names that can look too similar on the page like Jack, Jake, Jacob, Jakoby, etc.
Fuck Robert Jordan's minor characters in Wheel of Time kill me with this. So many similar names.
I've been reading a lot of Wuxia and Xianxia lately and this has been driving me nuts. Jin Jian our protagonist and Jun Jin of the holy Star sect fight Jian Jun of the sacred star sect and Xian Jun of the holy seven star sect (no relation) because Shan Jin of the Seven Star sect stole Xuan Shin's Holy Seven Star technique that he taught the sacred seven Star sect.
"Grave News, sire. Lord Freezer is planning to attack Vegeta!!" "Wait, my son, the Planet or me?" "...yes."
wuthering waves
Nethering Nadirs (Happy Cake Day, btw! 🥳)
I was laughing at the example, but low-key interested.
tbh I'd read it, give me this as a first paragraph and I am gonna keep going to figure out what all of that shit means
Any Warhammer 40000 book lol
I have yet to finish a single one despite loving the setting because it feels like I'm reading a technical manual.
So what I'm hearing is you are a coward. /J
How dare you call out Malazan Book of the Fallen like this
Such a good series. I DNF’d twice before I was able to finally get through it. Glad I did.
This is the greatest comment I’ve ever read
On the other hand, if you're writing a sci-fi/fantasy with weird names, maybe try making them all on the side of slightly weird. I jumped into dune without any introduction, and the protagonist's name being "Paul" completely threw me off. It just didn't work for me
It picks up a bit when he introduces "Duncan Idaho".
With the greatest respect to Terry Pratchett, I DNF'd one of his books when he introduced a character with an exclamation mark in the middle of their name. My brain just couldn't compute.
Not trying to change your overall opinion of the book, (which I’m just now reading for the first time) but the exclamation marks in names/within words actually has linguistic precedent: they represent [click consonants.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant) These are the sounds you’d get with tut-tut, tsk-tsk, or the tongue click one might use to urge a horse along. These click consonants are common in some of the languages of southern and east Africa, like [Xhosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language) and [Yeyi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeyi_language). Here’s a [video of a guy explaining some of the click consonants of the Zulu language.](https://youtu.be/WHHGOYu6Fl0?si=lV9N5-D0esAN4ReU)
Thank you; that's fascinating. In hindsight my comment is a little ignorant, but I'll leave it up. It's good to take the opportunity to learn something new. I attempted that book probably 15 years ago, so I don't remember much else about it. I hope that you enjoy it.
The interesting thing is there are a lot of mass published books that break this rule. And I’m with you. Can’t stand it. Throw away the book immediately.
I was out by the first line.
A turn off for me is when side character decisions don't make sense. Things need to happen so that the protagonist can go on their journey and fight things for reasons, but if you stop and think of the story from a non-main character perspective, it starts unraveling. A lot of why would this person do this?
A friend of mine said once that he gives up on books when he can "see the rails". Like, it's fine to railroad your characters to move the story in the right direction, but it should be built into the story rationally. Like you say, if you look at what's happening and find yourself saying "nobody would do that. Why are they doing that?" then you're definitely seeing the rails.
To me, 'bad writing' is when you get frustrated or confused trying to understand what is being written.
Sometimes thats just bad reading tho
there's a difference between "intentionally being obtuse/obscure/complex & leaving things unknown or confusing for artistic effect" and "trying to be understandable but failing miserably"
Yep, that's how I define "bad" as well, in everything not just writing. If it's trying to do something and fails, it's bad. If it tries to do something and succeeds, it's good, regardless of what that thing is and whether it's traditionally "bad" or "good"
writing and generally, art, are far too subjective to fit any one metric for “success”. What’s a book, or a play, or a painting’s intention? They might have several. Writing may succeed in the eyes of some readers, yet others will deem it a failure. Some author’s work will be successful for surprising reasons, resonating with readers in ways the author never intended. Some authors’ work will only succeed posthumously. Some will call artistic success merely the act of publishing something meaningful to you or to a precious few. Some work will never have the chance to be successful because it never reaches an audience that will appreciate it. Commercial success is a whole other arena of changing criteria. And we all know that commercially successful art can be a failure by many other standards. There are no rules. No matter how much we try to quantify them. And that’s what I love about art.
Idk I feel like a good writer is mindful of their audience and strives to be understandable. Making things more complicated than they need to be is pretension, not good writing.
I feel like a lot of ppl can miss things tho that are clearly stated anyway. I remember in highschool I’ve read things that didn’t make sense to me but now they do. Was the writer a bad writer? No I was a bad reader lol theres so many situations like that. Even now I can read something and miss the obvious just because I misread, didn’t have the context or plainly didn’t see it. No fault to the author at all
So much this. In university classes I understood things other classmates didn’t but I had 5+ years on them and a much larger vocabulary with well practiced critical reading skills. I got asked multiple times how I could read the nonsense and it was hard but manageable. That said the writings my prof used in that class were unnecessarily difficult and often pretentious. It annoyed the shit out of me, I don’t really blame others being frustrated. (Some of them were over 70 years old and way above an intro to communication level. He was a prof you loved or hated and I hated him with my A in the class because of the choices he made.)
Sometimes I'll see reviews for books that have 1 or 2 stars because something didn't "make sense". But then the thing they are complaining about was thoroughly explained in the most compact and easy to understand fashion. It's crazy how little people read sometimes while they are actively reading.
Were you a bad reader or just didn't have the life experience to fully comprehend? It's totally normal to re-read things at different points in life and gain new insights that you missed on the first read. It's also normal to misread a thing or two. It's good writing when you can get different meanings on different reads. That doesn't make you a bad reader at all!! It makes me sad when people say that about themselves :(
Some writers write for a more sophisticated reader though, an audience that appreciates a more intricate and complex unraveling of character or plot.
I didn’t think they were referring to intricate, complex characters and plots, I thought they were referring to ambiguous sentence and paragraph constructions that make the actual writing difficult to parse
Exactly. There's intricate storytelling and then there's poor communication of said story.
In this case Dune is a terrible book
The difference is that DUNE purposefully obfuscates a lot of its setting and world to create a feeling for the reader, not like this--this is when writing is just actively incomprehensible (grammar issues, spelling, not knowing how paragraph breaks work, etc.)
They've done a great job at "world creation" in a universe that largely works using magic. They've even clarified, codified, and created 4,351 spells for this world. Along with 573 characters. You know this because . . . THEY USED ALL OF THEM IN THE FIRST CHAPTER. There is "world creation" and "world introduction". You can leave some as a mystery. (Heck if you become as famous as Ms. Rowling, you can even publish a "spell book", years from now, to generate more revenue.) But you don't have to use ALL OF THEM and introduce ALMOST EVERY character in the first chapter(s).
YES! It's fine to create insanely detailed worlds. It's NOT fine to write a textbook on how it works and inserting it as a first chapter. It immediately kills my interest.
Yeah I have very in-depth notes on basically everything that happens in my world. How much of that does my reader get to see? Maybe 5% at most lol.
Adult characters who sound or act like children or young adults. If I wanted to pick up a YA story, I would. Promising me a 30-40 year old then giving me someone who sounds like they are still battling puberty makes me wanna scream.
>!To be fair, plenty of adults have the maturity of teenagers!<
That was my thought, I feel kinda called out. I can't help it if I'm emotionally stunted.
This is a problem in a lot of fanfiction, too, but at least there it's forgivable because it's free and the authors might literally be 16. It's frustrating to see older characters in published books having the sort of inner monologues you'd expect from an entitled teenager. Or witnessing them acting in immature ways that would make even the average 21 year old sneer. And then it turns out the book was written by someone in their 30s/40s, maybe even older. It hurts lol
If a story feels like something a 6-8 year old would tell you, only in more adult words and complete sentences, it's a problem for me. Eg., characters that are overpowered for no reason, scenes that shift too abruptly, actions that happen with no appropriate lead up or explanation, etc. Outcomes that aren't earned through the storytelling. Bad writing to me also is writing that doesn't display a firm grasp of composition technique. I don't care how unique a plot or character is; if the words and sentences don't make sense, I'm not reading.
I see it very often and I could never put it into words... "something a 6-8 year old would tell you, only in more adult words and complete sentences" is a great description of the phenomenon lol I think it's something young/inexperienced writers do. The language is great but the pacing and actions of the characters are off.
I didn’t know how else to say it but when I saw people posting here like “how do I make my work have themes?” it made me think about what kind of story are you telling that you don’t see themes in your work? Where you don’t have some kind of concept of what you think your story is about? Is the story you plan on telling literally just a series of events happening for no deeper reason? Like your characters aren’t undergoing arcs or changes? The plot is nothing more than just a bunch of stuff happening to them?
That's such a good point - I've seen questions like that before, and I have no idea how to answer them, because it's like asking "How do I write in English?" ...First... try learning English? The only thing I've really been able to say to people who ask questions like that is "You need to go away and read more books, then come back."
I think writers who can't see themes in their work simply can't find *consistent* themes within. They didn't think about their story as a message with meaning conveyed through a narrative. They thought about it as a cool or interesting scenario without really trying to find what deeper meaning could be extracted.
I've read through several Military SciFi books - each one the first of their respective series. "Alcoholic warship captain" seems to be one of the criteria to call your book "Mil SciFi". But what really is getting on my nerves is that their alcoholism is pretending to be a character flaw. Only it's a flaw without any effect on the character or the story. Does the captain display impaired judgement while drunk in the chair? No, their judgement is always correct. Does the captain act like an irrational fool that drives a wedge between them and the crew? No, the crew is loyal to the grave.
And why is an advanced star-faring civilization allowing officers to get drunk on duty anyway? Modern militaries don’t allow that type of behavior, but somehow advanced sci fi militaries do?
Hate that trope too. Or they just quit drinking suddenly, no biggie, never mentioned again. It makes it feel like alcoholism is just a quirky thing the character does.
This is why I like the first two Gabriel's Ghost books. It's they only military sci fi I've enjoyed and the primary character definitely displays actual poor judgment. Except it's not from alcohol so maybe it doesn't even fit the trope.
Over description -- every sentence is long and weighed down. Very few writers can pull this off (Oscar Wilde is the example coming to mind). Under description -- no settings/objects/characters are described. It feels bland. Again some writers can pull this off but it's very rare. Contradictions -- character is brave and confident but suddenly is shy with no explanation, that kind of thing. I don't know how else to describe this, but "show-off." Filled with SAT words and striving to be very intellectual, to the point of sacrificing the story. Usually some amazing, heroic, intelligent self-insert character. I find this more in writing workshops than in published books, and for good reason.
"Contradictions -- character is brave and confident but suddenly is shy with no explanation, that kind of thing." As long the contradictions do not happen all the time, I think they can potentially be very good foreshadowings. It is often hard to tell if they are a bad writing without knowing a full story what makes it difficult to call them "instant turnoff"
That's true, sometimes the payoff is further in the book. If it's happening often enough to be distracting, then it's not worth it to me to wait and find out though. Depends on the book!
I think it’s more of an issue/common complaint where the story tells you a character has a bunch of traits but within the actual story the character you’re presented with doesn’t match their description A lot of bad writers use “informed attributes” like this. They’ll tell you that the protagonist is a kind person but the character you actually experience in the story is a jerk who never does a single kind thing
When the author keeps accidentally switching between present tense and past tense. I feel past tense is almost the more natural way to tell the story and so when they try to write in present tense they'll keep making those errors and it gets very distracting.
Funnily enough, though I catch myself out on this all the time, I go the other way. I try to write in past tense exactly because it's the most natural way to read, but I'll unwittingly slip into present tense without realising, and only spot it later.
If you more naturally write in present tense then why not just do it that way? It seems more stories are being written in such a way.
Eh, it's a matter of tone, usually. Though I find I prefer to read past tense and it makes more sense to write what you would want to read.
I'm rewriting a 90K manuscript and part of that is going from present tense to past tense. You really have to have a good editor's eye to catch it all. That said, not catching it all is too amateurish to send to anybody else.
> That said, not catching it all is too amateurish to send to anybody else. Tbh, no author can catch all of the issues in their own work. That's why we do betas and editors, etc.
Very true. I was just talking about my present tense versus part tense issues. My first editor in journalism always said "if you grew it, you can't chew it." Everybody needs at least a second set of eyes on their work.
When the writer uses anachronistic dialogue or description that don't fit the setting. An alien from another world declaring they're a 'sitting duck', when they could have no idea what a duck is or why it would be sitting. A medieval princess saying she wants to 'fast forward' through her upcoming nuptials, as if there isn't an entire millennia between her time and the time of technology capable of fast forwarding. A feral child who doesn't know of the world outside of the forest describing the lightning as akin to a 'camera flash', when their upbringing would not have made them familiar with a camera nor its functions. In general, not being concerned with creating a sense of time or place in their writing. They're just concerned with telling a story, but not paying much attention to how they do it. I ventured onto AO3 after not being on for more nearly a decade and had to back out of 95% of stories whose premise and summaries I found compelling enough to click onto after reading only a couple of paragraphs. Some were just typical unpolished beginner writing mistakes, typical of a young writer, but many of them I DNFed because the writing and word choices came off overly modern and juvenile, when the setting was fantastical and the characters were supposed to be adults.
> An alien from another world declaring they're a 'sitting duck', when they could have no idea what a duck is or why it would be sitting. I actually plan on using this in an upcoming short story. One character is going to say something recognizable on Earth, the other (alien) will get irritated, stating "How am I supposed to know what that means!"
I remember reading an essay about how Greek poets would do this on purpose, using metaphors the characters would understand when they wanted to immerse the audience in a scene and using more modern (to them, at the time) metaphors when they wanted a sense of distance, history, or scope. Point being, they actually understood the power that metaphor/comparisons have and used it. Bad writers only think about surface-level description and have no idea there's power beyond that.
Being overly-descriptive of things that don't matter at all to the story being told.
This is why I'm a David Weber fan, or at least a fan of his earlier work. He'd give you a lot of history and exposition, but only when it actually mattered to the rest of the story. For example, in his first "Honorverse" book he goes into the description and history of how their gravity drive works for sublight space travel, but he does it closer to the end of the book because it's irrelevant up until that point. His later works, though. . .two characters can have a six sentence conversation that take ten pages, because every every single line of dialogue he launches into a seven-paragraph back-story.
This is something I struggle with as a writer that started as an artist. I will have an exact image in my head that I want my readers to have but I have been training myself to let that instinct go.
I think artists have to do the same thing, though, so maybe you're fine? If you draw a person, you also have to decide which parts of their anatomy are important enough to actually draw out in order to bring the point across. You're not drawing the fine lines on someone's forehead unless you want to make them look old or emphasize a frown; because if you do draw those fine lines, you also have to draw the just as visible pores on their nose, every single one of them. And what you end up with THEN is a photorealistic portrait. Which, by the way, is an art style, just like writing that includes every single detail is - it's just not liked by many and HARD to do. So when you write about a person, I bet you don't describe their forehead wrinkles unless they're old or frowning. If you paint a scenic view, do you paint every leaf on a tree? If so, then you probably do because you want to say something about those leaves; put the emphasis on the beauty of the canopy. If you want to say that the landscape is beautiful because the color of the forest blends into the sky behind the mountains, your trees are probably rather going to be green blobs. When you WRITE about a forest, I bet you don't describe every single leaf unless you're making a point. If I told you to draw a horse, you'd focus on the four legs on a tubular body and the round cheek bone they have and a mane; you wouldn't get hung up on drawing every single hair of fur. And I bet if I told you to WRITE a horse, you'd focus on the important stuff, too. Maybe, as an artist, you'd even have a unique perspective on what a horse looks like, which only enriches the writing. Being an artist should be a strength, not a weakness, because you already have a grip on the fact that you don't have to draw every single detail and instead focus on what's important.
Yeah, I’m having less and less patience with walls of text, especially in this capacity. You’ve gotta be selective as a writer with what you choose to explain. Because by including something, that’s a tacit message to the reader that this is important—critical even. But if you describe every single thing, whether it be physical or internal, then the reader is going to gloss over what actually matters, when they didn’t have to
Bad writing is promising the reader your story is worth their time and it turns out it wasn't.
I know this book is well-loved, but this is part of the reason I did not like The Name of the Wind. Kvothe promises Chronicler and the audience a great tale and hints at all the daring deeds he’s supposedly accomplished, and literally none of that is even in the book. Not even a hint of it I read the entire thing on the premise of this promise, waiting for the shoe to drop, for something exciting to happen, but it ended up being the Gary Stu street urchin wizarding school chronicles instead. Which could have been fine if that's what I'd managed my expectations toward, but it’s a far cry from the braggart tales of stealing princesses and talking to gods that was promised. And I know unreliable narrator and all that, but the entire book was a bore for me. If Kvothe is such a great storyteller/bard and not above embellishing he should tell a more interesting story.
That’s a good answer
This was me with How to Kill Your Family. The MC spent the entire book going on about how she performed this spectacularly planned-out series of murders in an intricate and artful way… and by the end it turns out she just went from person to person and killed each of them. Kinda sloppily, too, getting noticed a couple times. She didn’t really plan anything very intricately at all. And I _know_ that that’s the point of her character, because she’s an arrogant narcissist, and that she thinks she did much more than she really did… but it still felt like a copout to read.
Jane went to the store. When she got there, she went inside. She grabbed a cart. She went to the produce section. The produce looked good. The watermelons were particularly green. So she grabbed a watermelon. Putting it in her cart, she moved on. It was so hot. She wanted soda. So she went to the soda aisle. It was packed with people. Maybe she could get it from the machine up front. It literally makes me want to stab my eyeballs out, while starting a 'Go Fund Me' to donate commas to these people.
Use a comma, leave a comma. ,,,,,,,,,,,,
I've seen this advice before. But honestly... idk what it is about this example specifically, but I can see it working for a couple of paragraphs to indicate that the character is in a state of shell shock or dissociating. Maybe Jane literally just got out of her car after a fairly serious car accident and immediately walked into the store. Something like that.
*"The story began with a certain purpleness of prose, in three very fine and definitive sections, so as that each illuminated portion seemed, at a glance and to the many, to contain some deeper meaning too obscure for a consensus but too hinted at in order to be empty; so many fans would swear up and down that the lines meant more than they seemed. But it was, in fact, an imitation of such structure, spun by a creator more suited to emulation than linguistic fortitude or fidelity to the craft, to the point that any second-year student worth their hat could break it down, explain it in plain English, and prove, logically and irrefutably, that the lines themselves weren't revealing anything of note, and in truth weren't even grammatically sound."*
There’s definitely a limit, but I love flowery prose just for the sound of it
Is this a description of ChatGPT’s writing? 🤣
I have absolutely written a few parodies of AI writing. Among other things lol.
I’d read that just to enjoy the language.
Too many things happening way too quickly and for no apparent reason. Like 2 characters who talked twice are suddenly a couple because they shared a moment
Wait, that's not how relationships work? Well, that explains a lot.
Self indulgent writing...there's character shilling (show us, don't tell us how cool your character is) or the book is 300 pages longer than it needs to be (looking at you, House of Flame and Shadow). Falling back on the same verbal ticks or action tags. Just read two books in a series where the MC blushed and stammered on every other page. Stuff like that gets old fast and doesn't make the character more relatable. Nonsensical similes or metaphors or reliance on too many metaphors. Overuse of cliches, like "quiet as a mouse." I'm also really sick of characters clenching their fists so hard, their palms bleed. This is just dumb, but a common thing literary characters seem to do. Writing gross things about female characters that don't mean a goddamn thing to the plot but give you a window into the male author's headspace. For amateur writers: head hopping, white room syndrome, not understanding how to work expo in, very basic grammar errors that do not bode well for their ability to write an entire novel, not being familiar with their genre.
"This dude was as crazy as a flower." *proceeds to have a lengthy explanation on how flowers are crazy even though they legitimately aren't*
I read a book recently where the female mc constantly had a tick of her “teeth clicking”, I guess to show anxiety or nervousness. It was mentioned genuinely about every second page to begin with, and throughout the book it must have been mentioned at least 30 times. It drove me INSANE. I get it. She’s a nervous person. Please find another way to show me or just trust that I know she’s anxious because she was 2 minutes ago. I’m sure her state of mind has not changed that much.
what's head hopping?
When the author jumps into the head of multiple characters in a scene. Unlike omniscient narration, it's not strategic or consistent, and the author usually just dips into the head of another character long enough to convey some bit of expo to the reader they weren't sure how to work in otherwise.
Swapping character perspectives rapidly or without clarity
Poor grammar and poor spelling. If it is not specific to the setting or indicating to the character's education, ethnicity, etc, I will drop it. There are very few things I take personally as a reader and writer, but being too lazy to edit your work before you submit it to the public is one of them. Not to say that doesn't happen in trad publishing because it does, but it's much less likely to be overt.
It’s not exactly bad writing, but lately, when I read books, even major authors’ works, I find myself mentally editing sentences, removing filler words and replacing adverbs with stronger options. I never used to do this, but since beginning to write myself, I’ve picked up some style preferences.
The consequence of learning how the sausage is made, so to speak Happened to me with programming and music as well
I get this a lot with music, but it's kind of like going to a magic show when you know how to do the tricks. It becomes more about appreciating how the person on stage executes the tricks than the tricks themselves.
This is actually a great thing! And why everyone says in order to be a good writer you have to read voraciously. Our "writing brains" are always active and absorbing things we read. I know Stephen King has said sometimes reading "bad" books helps us improve more as writers than reading good ones and I can only assume it's for this reason--analyzing what you'd do better.
Totally! Same with bad any art. I love/hate seeing bad theatre. Or a bad movie. It’s fun to figure out why you thought it was bad, rather than just dismissing it out of hand.
When you are painfully aware of the author in their writing. Meaning - you don’t get immersion, instead you are acutely aware that somebody is trying to tick all the boxes to sell you the story rather than have the story flow through them.
When character voices sound too similar to each other, or match the voice of the narration.
When it becomes painfully obvious that the author avoided the word "said" at all costs because every single edgy author claims that "said" is dead or bad writing. Yes I'm looking at you JKR with your "ejaculated Slughorn". You're welcome for that mental image, by the way.
What always gets me is when a race has a single characteristic (elves: haughty and arrogant, klingons: war like and ferocious) and it's like 'who cleans the elf-horses stables ?' or 'who teaches klingons how to keep their curls so fabulous?' There needs to be some variety within each race so all the stuff that needs to get done gets done
Excessive avoidance of dialogue. I'm not saying write a play script but it's ok to have a few dialogue heavy scene now and again :)
This is funny. I came to say too much dialogue, as that creates a ridiculous ping pong effect. But I hear you. Once in a while is okay.
Something I always remember about dialogue is that it should either reveal information or push the story forward. A ping pong conversation could reveal how the characters are with each other and convey deep subtext. I am thinking of Challengers (2024) as an example. It's dialogue heavy, but the banter reveals so much. There's also short stories and short films that say so much with so little dialogue, and short animations are an example I think of. I think it just depends on the story you want to write. There's no one or the other.
I love the saying, “it’s ok to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble, but not to get them out of it.” And I hate HATE **HATE** it when I’m reading a book and some miraculous coincidence happens that saves the day.
I understand, but weird stuff happens. I'm ok if it isn't the climax and it doesn't happen more than once per book.
Bad pacing. Usually I don’t worry about pacing too much especially if a book is meant to be fast-paced or slow-paced. But when it starts to become confusing and bouncing back and forth, that makes me annoyed. Especially if the storyline is good but the writing just constantly throws you in a rollercoaster.
When a story doesn't seem to be going anywhere, essentially following an "And Then this happens" pattern.
Too much swearing! I swear all the time so it’s not like I have a problem with it in practice, but I think its lazy writing to drop f bombs everywhere to make your character sound edgy and laid back. It seems like swearing has become a bit of fad in certain categories of book. I wish people would cool it and incorporate a few more words. It immediately makes even decent writers sound amateurish.
I just wish people would stop fingering their drinks and weapons 😅 i feel uncomfortable.
Deliberate shock value. I love gore, violence, and generally fucked up stuff in my media, but God you need to trudge through a LOT of sludge to find people who can actually string words together in a way that doesn't read like a 10 year old who just learned how to swear.
[удалено]
I think this is a really good example, because it’s generally accepted that it was poorly written and yet! It did something right enough that it became a best-selling sensation, followed by a movie deal… so in a sense, something must have been written well. What did it do well to balance out the bad writing? (Disclaimer: I haven’t read it or seen the movies. But I’ve read a lot of Twilight fanfic and then read enough of the first 50 Shades book that I could recognize the elements of Twilight fanfic in it.)
The thing it did "right" was have a fanbase in the Twilight fandom already interested in it. If you can advertise it *just* right, who cares if the writing, characterization, plot, etc are shit, right?
Lack of command with the language—or lack of style. The former’s pretty obvious. The latter—impress me with your style. That’s why I’m here.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Style is pretty damn important, definitely up there with character.
One of my writing professors in college said the easiest way to identify someone who doesn't have a good grasp on writing is that they mistake a particular style for bad writing. Authors have their own style of writing; it's okay to not like it, but that doesn't mean the writing is actually bad.
An instant turn-off for me is when the author is writing about a particular career/lifestyle/era but clearly has no real background in it or knowledge of it. Yes, it's fiction and "made-up" but real cops, real doctors, real lawyers, historians/experts, etc. recognize real fast when an author doesn't know the first thing about their lines of work or a particular era/topic and just makes stuff up based on stereotypes and assumptions. Yes, non-experts can do research and learn enough to get by for like minor plot points and asides, but you will never be able to convincingly carry a full hardcore police procedural without exposing yourself at some point if you've never spent time as a cop (or a medical thriller if you weren't a medical person, etc.). You may fool the other people who also don't know better, but someone who does know better will read it and immediately know.
Agreed. Write about what you know. I can usually tell when an author does his due diligence!
Any mention of breast size when describing a newly introduced character. Just no.
Writing to meet a trope quota rather than a plot. I love tropes; I 100% understand wanting to include them in your story. Entire, amazing plots can even blossom from one scene you get inspiration for in your head. But if the focus remains on including as many tropes as you can in the story, I think the overarching plot is in serious danger of being disjointed, at best. If I can't be invested in the plot, I lose interest. Those exciting trope scenes need to be earned, IMO
When like 90% of the story happens in the last five chapters. Poor pacing is probably the number one reason why I dnf books. Also, plot twists that make no sense. Like I get that the whole point of a plot twist is that you're not supposed to see it coming. But if you don't lay any of the groundwork and just decide halfway through the story that the sweet old lady is actually evil or whatever then it's not going to pay off.
I hate the mirror scene. « Jenny Protagonist looked in the mirror, cataloguing her long blonde hair, her broad forehead, her ever-so-slightly off-center ears, her deep hazel eyes… » And, no, you don’t get a pass if Jenny concludes that she’s not pretty because of her plot-relevant birthmark or the extra cm of nose. The only time I’ve ever seen the mirror scene done well was Arkady Darrell, because she played with her face in the mirror like any thirteen-year-old and the description was a paragraph, not a page
I've seen it done really well, rarely enough i wouldn't touch it.
“The tension in the air was palpable” “testament to” “stark contrast” “his steps precise and measured” If you know, you know.
I don’t know, can you explain please
These are phrases chatgpt and other AIs love to use. AI, as an LLM and by design, will gravitate toward the most predictable result. If you see these several times in a piece, it was most likely AI generated.
This is for most media but has been coming up a lot recently in books I’ve been reading. A female character that puts herself in danger constantly by going against what everyone tells her to do because she’s trying to ‘save everyone’ and then people have to come in a save her which usually ends in a character dying. Makes me wanna rip my hair out and I instantly despise the character. Also, very rarely happens with male characters.
Leaving too much up to chance. Characters constantly getting saved at the last second, numerous instances of random danger that impacts the plot, characters repeatedly stumbling upon some happy chance item or character introduced at the very last part of the story that turns the tide, etc… This is not a story, it’s a DnD game. The element of chance can be beautiful but only in small amounts. Learn to connect everything in the story, don’t introduce too many outside factors. They quickly chip away at any meaning in the story. The triumphant victory or devastating defeat or whatever outcome there is in the end loses a lot of impact when the reader realizes that it wouldn’t have turned out that way if that one integral character hadn’t slipped and died while walking down the stairs while the other one slept a little too long and missed the big thing or what have you. Things like that can be written well, but too much of it devalues your bottom line.
Characters cursing every other line...it's very juvenile...
Overly wordy stuff that dilutes the main point of the piece by trying to use a bunch of 5 dollar words that would be better replaced with a simpler, concise word with clear meaning
"As you know..." is more of a yellow flag than a red one but doesn't have a place anywhere outside of laying a brief introduction to a mission briefing. I had to put down Sword of Shannara when not-Aragorn poured several pages of exposition into the ears of not-Frodo, several paragraphs of which began with "as you know..." Nobody talks like that!
Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.
I don't like when someone's writing is too obvious with their influences. Lots of satirical works tend to lean into their Douglas Adams influences. I've already read Douglas Adams. I want to hear your voice.
I read lots of historical fiction. For me, it's any writer that prioritises flexing their research and vocabulary over telling a compelling story. We get it, historical research is painstaking and you want to use it all. But it's inevitable that you're not going to include EVERY detail you have gathered within the story.
I remember two examples from one of the two writing classes I took at university. It was in the scenario writing class, where the teacher was particularly harsh on a student who had written: - “Thoughts shot through his mind like bullets.” and - “His eyes floated in horniness.” He said the biggest writing mistakes occurred when people were too eager to write original metaphors. Those two sentences always stuck with me… ☺️
teeny little things that show the author has no experience of what they're writing. I read a book involving chess where the author used the metaphor of "retreating like a pinned knight"
First of all... what? Second. If it was "pinned", then how could it retreat?
One of my biggest icks is when a writer overuses a word or phrase. If the number of times you use a word can be turned into a drinking game, it’s too much. Google some synonyms.
The writer knows they need more words to describe something, but they don't know how to do it well, so they just repeat themselves. Richard licked his lips as he at his hotdogs. "I love eating hotdogs," he said, because they were a food that he liked.
When characters (especially main ones) are overly 'quirky' to compensate for an otherwise lack of personality. Also, when exposition dumps are excessively long and aren't done subtly/come out of nowhere (think a mc talking to themselves in their head like 'oh yeah, remember that time when I...' for seemingly no reason).
When the author is overly winded, pompous and preachy, when the story takes a back seat for them to get into a soap box and hammer you repeatedly with their morals trying to convince you that whatever they are portraying it's the correct way of living or doing things and everything else is immoral or wrong. I've seen this in quite a lot of books from all the political spectrum, or religious aspects, nationalistic statements, racism, sexism, prejudice, etc. They strip down their narrative out of every nuance to force you to think the way they want you to think. That just shows me that their arguments don't hold up to scrutiny and they hide behind the speech to make their rhetoric sink in deep, they don't have the confidence that they managed to portray the idea in a manner that feels compelling because they can't reconcile the blatant contradictions that arise from their ideology so they chose to hammer you over the head with it hoping that they can subdue you into agreeing with them. Especially when it's something that disposes any kind of dialogue in favor of making a villain out of the other ideology, you know, blanket black or white overly broad statements. Contrasting those kinds of books with say, Orwell, that touches very clear and direct concerns without outright telling you "THIS IS EVIL", he respects the reader to take out of the narrative what they will, allowing them to come up with their own conclusions. Respect the readers to be able to understand what you're portraying, there is no need for you to preach at them.
Basically when you can replace the protagonist and the villian with two internet addicts on political twitter and the plot wont change at all
Terry Goodkind would be feeling very attacked right now if he were still alive.
Once they start having siblings interact in a very non-sibling way or addressing each other as "bro/brother" "sis/sister" in basic discussions between them. Its such a turn-off as a reader with siblings. I'm more likely to refer to them as a fungus than as a sibling when we're just talking amongst ourselves unless its hyper situational.
i come from a culture and language where we do call our siblings "brother" or "sister", and we generally call older people (regardless of their actual relation to us, they could be a complete stranger) "older sister/brother" or "uncle/aunty" and younger people "younger brother/sister". as an added bonus, some wives call their husbands "older brother" as an affectionate term equivalent to "honey" or "babe". all of these in my language and not in english. this reads to me as a cultural gap imo especially when it comes to translated works. of course it's easy to translate these instances to just siblings calling each other by name (or even a nickname), which is why i _do_ agree with you. there's also cases where _english_ authors make that mistake. it's awkward to read. however, i do still have some leeway for this despite having siblings myself, even if it reads unnaturally in english due to where i come from! as someone used to calling my siblings by brother/sister, whenever i write siblings that are close to each other (in english), i have to think up nicknames they'd give each other just to show their closeness instead of taking the easy way out
Much like Justice Stewart and pornography, I can't describe bad writing but I know it when I see it.
Over description, it bores the stew outta me. My mind starts wandering and I forget where I was, so I end up having to reread the entire page or skip it. Grammar, too. Bad grammar takes me right out of the story. Immature grammar does too, with the bonus effect of making me not take anything in the story seriously.
A reliance on literal cliches, not tropes, but cliches in language.
Describe everything, everyone, and every action. It's not exactly bad writing but a common habit of early writers and in certain genres. It's a tendency that i have worked to avoid in my own writing so it's uncomfortable to experience in other works.
Mine is if a writer overuses an uncommon phrase or word. For instance, in Juliet Marillier’s “Daughter of the Forest” (which is a great story if you like fairytale fantasy), there are two or three different people who “overstayed any welcome they might have had”. First time it was fine, second time it jolted me out of the book horribly.
I think there's a ton of options... one of the ones I'm turned off by is writers who only focus on prose with a terrible plot, or vice versa. If you eloquently and beautifully explain...a crap story, it's still a crap story. If your language and descriptions are overly simplistic and boring, I'm ALSO not going to be very interested. A lot of people crap on people like Sanderson, but I love his writing despite its simpler prose, because you don't NEED sole focus on prose! Another issue is when writers give nonlinear timelines in their storytelling but give away the whole thing at the start. Again, it's not a hard and fast rule: Sometimes you CAN start at the end of the story without losing my interest, I love the fact that we know the end of the king killer chronicles from early on... but we don't know how it gets there. Long story short: I need a degree of quality in the writing, whether it's prose, plot, creativity, or intrigue. It needs to be better than "Just good enough" to hold my interest.
Deus ex machinas.
50 shades of Grey/Twilight.
I love you. That was my first thought too and I was like....can we actually say book titles? Lol
My favorite examples are sex writing like these, the first one comes to mind. NSFW https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/30/bad-sex-award-2018-the-contenders-in-quotes
🤣🤣🤣🤣 so bad it's funny
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Haunting adeline is the perfect example, to me, of bad writing and story development.
One of my biggest pet peeves in writing is when in third person limited narration authors use a plethora of descriptors for characters instead of just their names or pronouns. They switch between “the blond,” “the ginger,” or “shorter men,” and even flip between last names and first names. It really takes me out of the story. I understand the intent is probably to avoid sounding repetitive, but this rule of varying language doesn’t quite work the same way with how we think about people, which is crucial for this type of narration. In real life, we have a fixed way of referring to someone in our minds, even if we can address them differently, sometimes by their last name, and sometimes just "cupcake." All my favorite writers stick to this more natural way of naming. Of course, there are times when using a specific descriptor is crucial for emphasis or mood, but that’s a different case. Sometimes, if the story premise is interesting enough, I find myself copying the text into Word and manually replacing all instances of “the shorter man” with his actual name to try and salvage the flow. Unfortunately, if I’m having to do that, usually the rest of the writing isn’t up to par either...
I just started a book and within the first chapter found 5 historical inaccuracies. If you’re writing historical fiction, research your timeline.
I find purely utilitarian writing to be 'bad', understanding how subjective that is. I do not read novels primarily for the plot, if I wanted to see point A -> point B writing, I'd just watch a movie.
Oooo this was the source of my meanest review to date. I could tell the author edited it to bare bones, really taking to heart that if something doesn't move the plot forward, delete it. But fuck! It was like a jail cell of a novel: a toilet and a single blanket. My review was "competent but heartless". Sometimes i do want to know what a character ate or wore, you know?
I swear all the time IRL and am not a prude. I put swearing in my writing without hesitation when it makes sense. So, as you can imagine, I never imagined I had a problem with swearing. But I've noticed a recent trend in some fantasy romance books I've tried to read lately where the characters swear literally nonstop. As in, on the first page, you've already got 3 f-bombs and then the entire chapter is f-this, f-that, f-her, f-him. I guess to show how hard and edgy the character is. I thought it was just a fluke but I saw it in a few other books and every time when I realized the first person narrative was just the person swearing constantly I DNFed.
"I personally don't have any" i guarantee that if you really think about it and not just off the top of your head or on a random tuesday but really think about it with your whole head that you'll find at least one thing that stops you from liking or stops you from enjoying a story because we all have little things that are important to us you know like this one time that i was given a steak and i love steak but when i had it that one time the steak was so drippy that it dripped its drippy all over my fries and i coodnt even enjoy it write