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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