Discussion: Pet Peeves in Fiction

I have so many pet peeves about fiction because I read a lot.  Here are the ones I hate the most:

  • When authors write ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’ every single time.  It doesn’t make you sound smarter, trust me.
  • Just bad grammar in general.  Not the deliberate kind I have on my blog (because it’s supposed to be informal) but just bad grammar out of ignorance in a published copy.
  • LOVE TRIANGLES.  Please, please, please, can we just agree to stop this travesty?  It’s so overdone that it makes me want to throw my Kindle at the wall whenever I see it.  There are more important things in life than “Which boy do I like best?”.

And this one isn’t the author’s fault (usually), but:

  • Bad formatting.  Even on NetGalley, which gives out ARCs, I expect to be able to read your book.  Some publishers just think they can download the text straight from a Word document (or whatever they use) to the .mobi format without any changes.  That results in things like totally unreadable text obscured by pictures, every single sentence being on a totally different line, random numbers and crap in the text and sometimes even parts of the text are totally unreadable because they’re supposed to be a different colour in the physical copy but light colours don’t translate well to the .mobi file.  I actually had to send a publisher a pretty annoyed note about the last one.  Please: format your book, even if it’s just an ARC.

Okay, rant over.  Now it’s your turn: what are some of your biggest pet peeves in fiction?  Is there a trope you just hate with the passion of a thousand fiery suns?  Or do you just hate when people don’t take the time to proofread properly?  Let me know in the comments below!

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