We’re all different as readers. We all have our own preferences and pet peeves. And some of those things bother us enough to pull us right out of a story or keep us from starting in the first place. Everyone’s got a different list of those annoyances, but I’d guess we all have them. And it can be hard to get past them to see whatever good qualities a novel may have. That’s why writers benefit so much from really taking a hard look at their work. It’s not always easy. Trust me. But it’s important.
One pet peeve that a lot of readers have is poor proofreading. All authors make the occasional typo. I know I do – oops! And I think most readers understand this, and don’t have a problem with one or two misspelled words (I hope so, anyway!). It’s when there are a lot of typos and grammatical errors that readers notice. For some readers, too many proofreading errors sends a book to the DNF pile; that’s how important the conventions of language are.
The same is true of books where the writing style is disjointed or hard to follow. Readers don’t want to have to work hard to understand what a sentence says; most readers I know would rather use their energy to understand its meaning. Readers also don’t like to be confused by things like timeline errors or character name errors. These may seem trivial, but they really aren’t. Readers depend on those details to make sense of what they’re reading and to follow the story. This is why editing and proofreading are such important tasks.
For some readers, a book’s length can be a pet peeve. In fact, some readers won’t even try a book that’s beyond a certain number of pages. That may mean that these readers miss out on what could be a fantastic story. But many readers feel bogged down in details and narration when a book is too long. These readers are pulled out of a story that has a ‘saggy middle.’ They stop caring about the characters and get bored with all of the minutiae. This doesn’t mean that readers don’t want fleshed out characters and helpful background. They do. But too much description, too many side plots, or too many character details can take away from a story’s pacing and timing. And when it comes to crime fiction, this can take away from the suspense and tension that makes a good crime novel memorable.
Many readers are irked – sometimes to the point of not finishing a book – by ‘isms.’ People who love classic and Golden Age crime fiction will know that many of those stories are of their times. So, they know that there’ll likely be at least some racism, classism, sexism, etc. Even so, readers have their limits. Too many instances of ‘isms’ – even to make a point – can be enough to seal a book’s fate for a lot of readers.
The other side this proverbial coin is the problem a lot of readers have with books that they feel are preachy. These readers don’t mind it if a book has a message, even an agenda. What they don’t want is relentless hammering away on the issue, to the point where the book’s focus is no longer the plot or characters, but rather the issue the author is addressing.
There’s also the matter of suspension of disbelief. This is a little trickier, because some readers are quite content to suspend disbelief completely and ‘go for the ride.’ Other readers want everything in the story to be completely credible and as realistic as possible. Most readers’ views are somewhere between those two opinions. After all, it is fiction, so there’s always a bit of suspension of disbelief involved. But if you’ve ever thought, ‘There’s no way that character could do/know/see that,’ you know just how annoying lapses in credibility can be. We all differ on how much disbelief we’re willing to suspend, but we all have our limits.
Endings of stories can make for pet peeves as well. Have you ever thought that a novel’s end ruined the story for you? For example, some stories have a ‘Hollywood ending,’ where everything is improbably made right again, and the characters go off into the proverbial sunset. That’s not what real life is like, though, and a story with that sort of ending can put readers off. It’s not that readers don’t want their stories to have hope or optimism. Rather, they want their stories to be realistic. The ‘Hollywood ending’ can be especially irksome if it’s a real mismatch for the story. I’d guess that most readers want the story’s end to fall out naturally from the plot.
These aren’t by any means the only pet peeves readers have. And some of them have a lot more to do with personal taste than with the story itself (e.g. ‘This one’s just not for me.’). But plenty of them have to do with the way the story is put together. It all shows the importance of careful planning, editing, and proofreading. They’re not always fun parts of writing, but they really matter. What are your reading pet peeves?
*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Avril Lavigne’s Complicated.
Crime Writer Margot Kinberg 
I can tolerate flaws when the quality of the writing is good (and typos may be the fault of the publisher, not the author) but the real problem is when there is something so jarring that it pulls the reader out of the flow. Sometimes it is a narrative comment that is inappropriate or smug. But lately what has been annoying me are situations where the character puts him or herself into absurd danger for no good reason. Yes, there are times when sneaking up to eavesdrop or breaking into a house seem like a good idea but there are others where it is crazy. In one book yesterday, the detective opened her front door to someone she was sure was a killer, without even sending a text message to her team. In another I read recently, another female detective kept interviewing people in remote places without backup (she has had several near escapes). In real life, I assume these people would be disciplined!
When I was editing, my authors got annoyed when I asked about plot holes or inconsistencies so I learned to be more diplomatic – like performance reviews, always say something nice before you say something that will be perceived as criticism – but I felt that they needed to convince me first!
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You have a very well-taken point, Staircase Wit, about characters who put themselves in danger unnecessarily. It really makes no sense to, as in your example, open the door to someone who could very well be a killer, and not alert anyone. You would think that anyone would understand the risks involved and not do that. I’ve read other books, too, where a character follows a ‘bad guy’ without backup or any means of getting help should it be necessary. As you say, in real life, that would lead to discipline if not more.
As for plot inconsistencies, I agree that they can pull the reader right out of the story, If the editor isn’t convinced something could happen, readers probably won’t be, and that means that the reader is likely to lose interesting in the story.
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Hi Margot, You hit all my bugabears I think! I just got back from two weeks in Cuba and because of wind and man o’wars we could hardly get out to the reef (our reason for going). I brought lots of books, paper and digital, and there were a couple there as well, and I read every one. Fifteen in total. So I ended up reading some that I might have binned if I was home. A couple were really disappointing- long complicated plots with little satisfaction. One that really irked me was written by a writer I have loved, but every woman in the story (a literary novel) was beautiful and the protagonist was in his seventies but in such good shape! Ugh. Boy was the author’s age and sex ever showing. On the other hand I found a book there that I completely loved, a thriller set in Victorian London with the protagonist a grownup Tiny Tim! It’s called Mr. Timothy and is by Louis Bayers. A cracking good tale! Love Jan
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Thanks for recommending Mr. Timothy, Jan. It sounds great! And you bring up a very well-taken point about characters who are too beautiful. Most of us are ordinary-looking people and as we age, we’re usually in less and less good shape. Like you, I prefer when stories reflect that. It’s true, too, that stories that are too complicate, with too many threads and too much to remember, can pull the reader out of the story. Reading can (and should) teach, but it doesn’t need to confuse. I’d rather a more straightforward plot. to be honest. I hope you enjoyed your trip to Cuba, even if you didn’t spend the time on the reef that you’d hoped you would!
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Good points Margot. I’d add too many characters with similar names, names starting with the same letters and not clearly defined so that I have to keep going back to find out who is who.
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Thank you, Margaret. An I agree with you about names. Especially if there are a lot of characters, it’s important to make the names distinctive enough to remember who’s who.
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You’ve listed a lot of great pet peeves, Margot and I am bothered by many of them. I am especially bothered by poor editing – lots of typos and grammar errors. But really all of them can be annoying enough to stop reading. Your post is a clear warning to writers to avoid these readers’ pet peeves.
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Thanks, Carol. And I agree completely with you about poor editing. We’re only human, so I can handle one or two in the course of a book. But when there are too many of them, it’s a message to me that the editing was sloppy or non-existent, and I don’t like that at all.
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It annoys me when a police officer goes into a dangerous situation without back-up and with no good reason. It come down to plausibility. Kurt Wallander would have been sacked very early in his career!
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Haha, yes he would have, Christine! Real-life police officers take precautions so they won’t get into a dangerous situation alone. And as you say, they call for back-up when it’s necessary. The least fictional police officers can do is have a concern for their own safety. It takes a very unusual situation for me to believe a cop would act that way.
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I am sure I have my personal frustrations with novels, but right now I cannot think of specific ones. I do complain about long books, and my personal choice for length of a novel is 250 pages, but I do read longer ones. The last book I finished was 575 pages, The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. And I have read some classics over 1000 pages, although it wasn’t easy.
I like Christine’s contribution. I have been watching a lot of police TV shows recently where one policeman wanders into a potential bad situation alone. And of course there is Bill Crider’s Sheriff Dan Rhodes, who often makes that mistake, although he at least has the excuse that he has very few people working with him. However, in the last Bill Crider book I read, Winning Can Be Murder, the sheriff did make an effort to avoid that situation.
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Length of book really is an interesting thing Tracy. In some books the length isn’t a problem. In fact, my
husbandresident sci-fi expert says that sometimes, you need a longer book to set the stage for a novel since the world of the novel may be very different from the life most of us know. On the other hand, I always liked that Agatha Christie’s novels aren’t very long as a rule. You don’t them to be long.As for police officers, I know just what you mean about taking too many risks. And yes, Dan Rhodes does have a habit of doing that. Still, I forgive Crider; he was such a talented author.
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Those are interesting peeves, Margot! I confess that I do find bad proofing a problem – I can ignore a few which have slipped by, but some books seem riddled with them and I find that lazy behaviour on the publisher’s part. Surely they can pay a proofreader! I can move past isms, and I don’t mind it if a plot is whacky or unusual – that can add to the fun! Preachy does sometimes lose me though…
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Thanks, KBR! I’m with you about proofing. One or two isn’t a big problem; that can happne – whoops , happen 😉 – to any of us. But too many really do make a story smack of a bit of laziness. For me, -isms depend a lot on the context. Some books are of their time, and one expects there’ll be a least a few. But in other books, it’s annoying to say the least. Unusual plots can work for me if they’re in deft hands, but it does have to be done well. And preachy? Sorry, not my thing, even if I agree with the author’s point of view.
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And I also see that Constance at Staircase Wit went into the issue of characters putting themselves in danger also. It must be happening in lots of fictional plots out there.
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I think it must be, Tracy. Constance mentioned it, Christine did, you did, and I’ve noticed it in my reading. I just don’t think real-life police do that sort of thing, and as Christine said, if a real cop did what some fictional cops like Wallander do, that person wouldn’t last long on the force.
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Ha, nearly all of these are pet peeves of mine! Agreed, an occasional error is forgivable, but repeated grammatical errors or typos will irritate me into abandonment. And don’t get me started on saggy middles! I’d have to add present tense to my own peeves – a book has to work ten times as hard to win my love if it’s written in present tense. And the current trend for omitting speech marks drives me to drink! (Well, actually, to cake – we all have our own foibles… 😉 )
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Saggy middles really are annoying, aren’t they, FictionFan? There’s a tricky balance, I admit, between fleshing out the story so that it’s interesting, and ‘padding’ the story so that it drags on far too long. But I do like it best when authors don’t meander too much. As for present tense, you’re not the only who feels that way. I’ve read a few that worked for me, but I’ve noticed many books are written that way now. Perhaps it worked in one book, and publishers took note? At any rate, I couldn’t agree more about speech marks. I don’t know why they’d be omitted, and I never enjoy anything written that way. Like you, I’m driven to the cake tin, the wine glass, or something… 😉 )
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I agree with everything you’ve said here. Really good essay. I think I’ll add tone and style (everything including disjointed sentences) to the list. If an author is trying too hard to be funny or if their style is very unorthodox to the point that it gets annoying, I’ll probably put the book down. And pacing. I prefer moderately paced or fast paced books. Something really slow is tough. I push through but it often gives me a headache.
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Thanks very much, OP. I’m glad you enjoyed the post. I agree with you about style; authors who have a style that’s difficult to follow or, as you say, who try too hard to be funny, tend to pull me out of books, too. It’s hard to get the author’s meaning and purpose if the style makes a book hard to read.
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You’ve hit most of my pet peeves, Margot. Saggy middles cause me to DNF books more often than I’d like. Or endless musings and flashbacks. Ugh.
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Oh, I know what you mean about too many flashbacks and musings, Sue. Parallel or dual timelines can work, but simply having too many memories or musings can definitely pull the reader out of the book. And, yes, saggy middles are a bugaboo for a lot of people. That’s the quickest way to the DNF pile for plenty of readers.
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Yours was a great post, with a list we can all agree with, and then your readers added more good examples in the comments! I kept thinking, all the way through, ‘oh yes, me too, oh yes to that one.’
I would only add that it’s particularly annoying in crime books when a typo or a timeline discrepancy makes me think I have spotted a clue! But it turns out to be just a mistake. Infuriating.
Agatha Christie could be careless about some things, but certainly in her prime you could pick up clues by paying close attention – I’m thinking of A Murder is Announced, where there is a spelling that could have been a typo – I know you’ll know what I mean. A reason for proof-readers and editors to be very very careful.
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Thanks, Moira. And yes, the people who were kind enough to comment added some excellent examples. And you’re right about those mistakes that can lead a reader in the wrong direction. It really is infuriating, especially with a clue.
As to Christie, I agree. Most of the small mistakes she made didn’t take away from one’s ability to follow the plot and pick up clues. And A Murder is Announced is a good example. Editors and proofers (and authors, too!) do need to be extremely careful…
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