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.