Tagged: love triangles

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!

Discussion: Love Triangles

I’m pretty sure you guys all know my feelings about love triangles by now, but I’ll reiterate for any newcomers: I hate love triangles with a passion.

They used to be kind of cool and really ratcheted up the drama in the few books they appeared.  The love triangle trope was used, but it was fairly rare.

Enter the Twilight phenomenon.

Bella had to choose between Edward and Jacob and fans went nuts over the fact.  There were and still are ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’ fans and although the series is obviously finished they still go berserk over it.  Which is fine because if people are reading (even Twilight), that’s awesome.  But I’m getting a little off topic here.

The point is that enterprising authors and publishers saw how much a love triangle enhanced interest in the series by fans as well as how it generated buzz amongst the general public, who would then be compelled to read the book as well.  Can you see where I’m going with this?  So because of the ridiculously huge success of one triangle, now almost every single YA book I read with a female main character has two good-looking guys fighting over her.

Cue the eye-rolling.  I really hate how love triangles are forcibly added to the plot to create a dramatic subplot and I really, really hate how they’re so unbelievable 99% of the time.  The latter is often due to poor writing or the author doing a half-hearted love triangle because their editor told them to.  Love triangles can be done well (see: Cleopatra’s Moon), but those are rare and the fact is they’re so overdone.  Can we just let the trope die for a bit?  Or at least use cryogenics to freeze it for a few years, even a decade before reviving it.

So I’m done rambling about my hatred of love triangles, but what do you think?  Do you love or hate love triangles?  What was the worst love triangle you’ve ever read?  The best?  Why do you think so many authors use love triangles?