Dear Authors — Items That Annoy Me in Books to Keep Away From
My takes on certain “trends” in the bloom
Los Muertos Crew via Pexels
As a book addict and a hard to please reviewer, I have read hundreds of books across all genres, and I am keen on reading the book reviews people leave on sites like Goodreads and YouTube.
I have noticed a few items in books almost all the readers dislike.
Here is a list of things you have to avoid doing to win our hearts.
Switching to poetry out of the blue
It is one thing to make your prose sound like a long poem. (For example J. R. R. Tolkien)
It is another thing that the prose becomes a poem sporadically.
Books like We Were Liars, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and Ugly Love have the habit of suddenly breaking into a poem. One moment, the character is thinking. The other — her sentences begin to rhyme.
This way, the writing style can get appalling.
The prose should be written uniformly to give the readers comfort, as it is already an overwhelming experience (in a good way) to feel the scenes happening. If you want to write a narrative poem, write only that. Don’t try to mingle bits of rhyming lines into a solid paragraph.
Putting unrealistic tropes the universe hates
How a trope is viewed can be subjective. You may like to read the Chosen-One trope while I retired from liking it years ago.
Yet, after reading and watching book reviews, I have found a handful of tropes hated word-wide (almost).
The reason is: They are far too unrealistic to happen in real life.
An example is the instant love trope.
Novels like Ugly Love, Twilight, and Shiver contain this trope and don’t get more than three stars from me. Authors need to understand that readers are logical people and need reasons for everything. Give us proof that the characters are perfect for each other by building good chemistry between them!
Another usually hated trope is I-am-not-like-other-girls trope. Blue Sargent in Raven Boys is an example.
So, what are you? An alien? Everybody shares some similarities, some differences. That is not something to be ashamed of or hide. Can’t girls not like video games? Or can’t they enjoy reading without associating it with any archetype?
The major characters don’t invoke any emotions or change
If I had to choose between plot and characters, I would choose the latter.
Maybe it is because I love seeing, like several readers, how the human psyche works, what leads our kind to particular decisions and causes transformations.
When the protagonist doesn’t invoke any emotion in me, it is easy to forget the book. I also dislike when, after going through a whole lot of traumas and experiences, the characters’ inner principles and actions remain the same.
It defeats the point of the character arc!
Harry Potter from the Harry Potter series is an example of my first objection. But the side characters in the series (like Snape and Bellatrix) make up for his dullness.
An example of the latter objection is Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games.
In the last book of the trilogy, it disappointed me when she accepted the proposal to host the games for the oppressor’s children. She remained the same girl throughout, not realising that as it was in her case, they didn’t get to choose their parents.
The characters I love are Tyrion Lannister, Hennessey, Peter Van-Houten, and Frodo Baggins.
You will notice they all are crooked and twisted in different ways.
(Here is a guide on how to make your characters realistic.)
Write a purple prose
Your perfect prose can make readers give the book five stars.
In case you opt for writing purple prose to make your book extraordinary, readers would dislike your work.
Purple prose (as defined) is overly ornate prose text that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its extravagant style of writing, thereby diminishing the appreciation of the prose overall. It is characterized by the excessive use of adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors.
Simplicity is the best tool to write a book.
Authors like George Orwell and Ernest Hemmingway have endorsed preciseness to write novels. It gets obvious when you read their novels.
In contrast, Christopher Paolini described even trivial items or actions which could be summed in a paragraph literally over pages in his Inheritance Cycle. The author should understand that endless exposition for something not crucial to the plot will eventually bore the reader.
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