"Ewwww! I don't want to see your writing!"

I'm copying this from when I posted it at KellyzKorner, so please pardon the occasional glitch.



I have been giving some thought (no, really!) to why certain devices, cliches, patterns, and so on that are often seen in writing and TV/movies drive me nuts, while others that are arguably no better are quite tolerable or even endearing.

I have come to the conclusion that a major determining factor is that it really really REALLY bugs me when a writer can't make a story read like a story instead of like something somebody wrote.

What's that supposed to mean? It means, roughly, that whenever something about a story--be that story a novel, a short story, a movie, an episode, whatever--slaps me in the face and screams "I'M FICTION! SOMEBODY MADE ALL OF THIS UP!!", I tend to take exception to such treatment. Some devices and patterns provoke this response, others don't. But which are which?

This is too broad a topic for me to properly handle in this first post, so it'll probably take me a few posts at least to feel like I've covered everything I want to mention (and even then I'm sure I'll forget something). But feel free to chime in whenever you want, whether in response or with your own peeves or whatever.

This is gonna be a mess because one point will tie in with another and I always want to acknowledge that, but I'll just have to deal with it.

Keep in mind that there are always exceptions to all this, like stories that are deliberately over-the-top.




*Topic #1: Foreshadowing.

*Topic #2: "This has been done already."

*Topic #3: "Oh no, not another one where...!"

*Topic #4: I don't want to see your writing!

Here's another cliche that I am absolutely SICK and TIRED of that would probably fall under #2 above:

...So, what are your pet peeves when reading books or watching TV and movies?

Umm...yeah.

Yeah "yeah", no kiddin'!

Well, the infamous Bermaga "reset button" goes without saying. Tho of course those two were hardly the first to make use of such a thing.

What really drops the suspension of disbelief for me is bad dialogue. Chris Claremont of X-Men fame, for example, writes horrible dialogue. Stilted, overly wordy, sounding like his characters swallowed a thesaurus. The technobabble that infected later Trek series Voyager and Enterprise are also examples of this. Don't have your character say "The irridated derapitator is overloading the flux capacitor" when "The engines are overheating" will do.

Damn, that makes me feel bad. I cant write or spell for shit.

Particle rays, temporal resets, and exploding reactors should be banned as far as the resolution of any future science fiction plot is concerned.

You ain't lyin'.

I recently read this blog entry making fun of "Claremontisms." (Dave's Long Box is usually a great read, by the way. Funny guy.)

"No quarter asked, none received."

In the two years since I've joined Godawful Fanficiotn (a place where many bad fics are snarked and torn apart), I've grown to have a lot of pet peeves. It's a pretty long list, but the one that sticks out the most is character assasination--sometimes to the point where it might as well be a whole different person enitrely. Like the countless Harry Potter fics that hve Hermione turn from a bookworm into a self-obsessed, girly girl, not unlike the fangirls who write her that way.

And also, inane plots that starts one place and takes a big long detour. Case in point, the horrid ENT novel "Surak's Soul." Starts out with it being about T'Pol having to kill (albiet in the defense of a fellow crewmember) and wondering whether it was the right thing to do for four chapters and another ten chapters become about the Forehead Alien Of The Week drama. T'Pol's issues (like on the show, gee, how shocking) gets sidelined until the very end in a very cheesy way. I've only read one other Trek novel besides that one...please tell me they don't all blow chunks that that.

^^They don't. Peter David's especially don't.

If you want to keep that impression, then by all means, please don't read The Rift ...



Speaking of Trek novels . . . hmmm. The only peeve there that comes to mind and relates to this thread is when the author has the, ah, characters' blunt doubles running the show. ( Blunt doubles, get it? Ah, I crack me up. ) You can tell when this is happening because there will be at least one occasion when you think, "Okay, the crew has got to put two and two together and realize they need to take care of this and this and that", but they continue to wander around cluelessly, with the result that the plot keeps going past its expiration date. One such example is in Gulliver's Fugitives, which is the Officially Most Painfully Badly-Written Trek Novel Ever Until I Say It Isn't Or Pigs Fly To The Moon. With the cheap-o enemy machines running around the ship pwning everyone in sight, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, ever thinks of having the pests transported off the ship into deep space. Instead we have to have Little Miss Plot Device save the day. Sheesh. Um, author, your story's bones are sticking out of its skin. No, they aren't supposed to do that, and it's kinda grisly frankly. Gonna call an ambulance? No? I didn't think so.

No, I haven't ever read that one. I'm thinking back on Rock And A Hard Place and I, Q.

My pet peeve? Characters with little depth running around looking for the ring, sword, treasure that will save the world, universe, realm. Throw in a dragon, elf, or gnome; add a princess/prince who was raised by wolves, peasants, and/or a hateful stepfather/stepmother and who doesn't have a clue that he/she is a prince/princess until he/she suddenly knows who to use the cutlery at a banquet. Bah

^Quite so. If you're going to do that sort of storyline, it's been done before. Over and over again. So you'd better either take it in a "new" direction or do it really really well ...