A book apparently everybody loves, but annoyed the crap out of me (written in present tense if I remember correctly) is American Psycho. Some chapters in, I started feeling like he was spoon feeding me his points. I wanted to shout "I get it already! He's shallow! The yuppies were shallow! Show me some story!" I'm sure there was a lot more to the book than that, but I couldn't notice is after being bashed in the head with it for so long... Another thing that annoyed me with it was the huge overuse of certain expressions, like hardbody. I now cringe everytime I read/hear that word... I also think that maybe I am too young to truly get it, never having lived in that time period and all.
This hit home so hard I had to slap a hand over my mouth so I wouldn't wake up the Mrs. Most recent face-palm moments came with our current WIP. Lesson learned: don't make changes to the plot in a hurry. Another pet peeve: KaTrian mentioned this already, but it's so annoying it's worth repeating: authors who write about subject X when they don't really know anything about it (or just think they do because they watched a Hollywood movie about it). If you don't know a subject, circumlocute around it or something, but please don't just fart something and hope it flies under the radar because that's underestimating your readers (which is also very annoying). A good example of this are Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels. He writes all this bs about combat and gun stuff and the end result is like something written by a teenager who's spent too many hours playing HALO (or whatever is the latest hottest military FPS out there). Now that I think about it, the teenager would've probably done a better job. Example: honestly, who wipes blood out of their eyes in the middle of a gun fight for ten seconds (and ends up killed because they did)? Honestly, it takes 2-3 seconds or so to get most liquids / semi-liquids out of your eyes to the extent that you can see the other guy well enough to shoot him when he's 20 feet from you. All the combat stuff in the SS series is straight from a bad Hollywood movie: all the bad guys / guards / mercenaries, i.e. characters you only see once before the MC kills them in a heroic fashion, are so incredibly dumb, you could throw a grenade at them and they'd think it's a potato and try to eat it. And Kadrey portrays these guys as real badass professionals with years of experience. If they are so dumb, how did they survive all those years? Reality check: they wouldn't have. Then again, the MC is so full of unfounded combat / gun clichés that in reality, he couldn't find his ass with both hands much less kill dozens and dozens of bad guys. Another pet peeve: stupid characters (I skimmed the thread and could swear someone mentioned them, but I could be wrong). I mean the girl who just has to walk into the building where the reader, she, and everyone and her dog know the psychotic killer is hiding with a knife, ready to kill her (and this when she has no other motivation to go into the building except simple curiosity: what made something go 'bump' inside?). Or people investigating murders / whatever weird things that are going on in the book. The answer is blatantly obvious, yet they spend 50k words trying to figure it out. Or they face some dilemma and mull over two poor choices just because the author didn't have the time (or brains) to figure out the 3rd, good option. Then again, the 3rd option would usually end the book after page 10 when they catch the killer / solve thing X so once again, just to have some Z-class story, the readers are treated like people with sub-human intelligence. Then again, stupid authors aren't much better than stupid characters. I should know, I've been (probably still am) a stupid author. I mean writers who are so caught up in their story, they don't stop to think and consider their plots and once again we have 50k words of stupid characters trying to accomplish thing X which they could have accomplished in 100 words, but the author just didn't take the time to consider every possible option / angle, so the obvious solution to the situation doesn't just go out the window, it never enters the house in the first place. These sorts of threads are fun, it's like the mental equivalent of opening the windows for a while and getting in some fresh air.
I've read a couple of books in both Dutch and English (I'm from the Netherlands, English is not my first language). Sometimes I read certain translations that really annoy me. The translator uses words that I do not find appropriate for the situation (Or they try to use 'Cool' words, like the ones teenagers would use and fail horribly!). Or endings that are not satisfying. The ones that make you think 'What?! That's it?'
Another one for me is heavy-handed allusion. In Octavia Butler's Oankali series (Dawn, Imago, Adulthood Rights), the MC of the first book (and a major player throughout all the books) is named Lilith. In the telling of the story, she is every bit her mythological namesake. I hold Butler's works on my top shelf, but that naming was sophomorically on the nose.
Books that try to be hip. And dammit, now I can't remember the name of the book I'm talking about. It was a murder mystery set in L.A. The size and style of the actual typewritten words change throughout the book. Sometimes the words are even turned on their side or there are only one or two words on a page. I would like to say that I gave it a chance but I never even bought the thing. I heard about it from a professor-friend of mine who told me I just had to read it. One quick page-through and that was enough. When I see stuff like that, all I think is that I can do that too. I can develop passable characters and a passable story; and I can do all kinds of crazy stuff with the physical words on the page. But that doesn't mean it's worth publishing. If the story was decent on its own, it would be a good story without all the gimmicky crap. As for present tense stuff, it has its place. In short stories when used in for a paragraph or two for certain effect, it can work quite well. But an an entire book? I wouldn't even bother. Oh; excessive descriptions of clothing. Just bugs me.
Whoa...quite a few anti-present tense people here but each to their own. I personally like it and The Hunger Games does it quite good. Although some fanfic I've seen use present tense just...u_u Anyway, I forgot the name of this book but it was just written way too...experimentally, like the book was trying very hard to be different and 'artistic' that the narrative got completely lost in that. I didn't finish that book and no surprise I don't remember the name. Also, YA blurbs that read: X meets dark and mysterious Y and they go on adventure..ect. Ugh. The local library is filled with these.
I'm not fond of present tense, but don't have any absolute rule against reading it. What bothers me as much as anything else is something that is not right in the context of the story. I'm NOT talking about suspension of disbelief when that is appropriate. I can enjoy a story that has ghosts, warp drives, or time travel if they take a reasonably good approach and stick to their own set of rules. As much as Dan Brown can write a page-turner and keep me up until 3 AM, I scream at the things he gets wrong after giving us a forward about how accurately researched it is. There are innumerable such items in his books. The worst was Digital Fortress where everybody takes seriously the idea that there is an unbreakable code algorithm, and people are killing each other trying to get hold of a copy that is encoded with the unbreakable code. That's like looking for a safe that has the only key locked inside - it won't do you any good to find it. NSA security is portrayed as being very easily skirted by the insiders-I doubt it. Then the big computer burns the place down by thinking too hard - no fuses? There is no security fence at an international airport. And so on.
The Redwall series sums up all the different ways a plot can annoy me. While the first few books entranced me as a kid, the extremely repetitive and cookie-cutter nature of the series drove me away from it; the plots of most of the books were very similar, and it was easy to tell Jacques was following a specific formula to crank them all out. Also, the villains were usually a thousand times more interesting than the protagonist and were only defeated due to their minions having Stormtrooper Syndrome to the max. The mild traces of racism throughout the books didn't really help, either. The only books I'd truly consider good are Redwall and Mattimeo, the former because it was the first in the series and thus gets a free pass on the repetitive nature of the plot, and the latter because both the antagonist and protagonist were interesting, and its battle between good and evil was actually rather well-crafted and didn't depend on the protagonists derping around with simple traps and tactics that the minions trip over their own feet and fall into. Mossflower was okay...ish, and all the other books basically took Redwall's plot, but with less competent villains and less likable protagonists. I'd usually never rip on a children's book series like this, except for the fact that, even as a kid who fit the series' demographic perfectly, I still saw these flaws and was annoyed by them.
I don't like bad writing - poorly thought out plots, poor technical skills, poorly developed characters, bad endings, and so on. These are generalities; I don't know if there is something specific that I won't at least give an author a shot at doing right. The tense or POV an author chooses doesn't turn me off by itself. You can tell a great story with any of them. It is silly to cast any of them as amateurish per se. So I'll give an author a shot no matter which they choose. If they're successful with it, great. If not, the book goes back on the shelf and I move on to something better.
I agree entirely. Also, I'm not a fan of didactic fiction. It doesn't matter if it's Moby Dick or the later books in the Sword of Truth series, it's always a turn-off.
Wow, I should've read this thread before posting in the novel section. Would readers be put off if a book switched from present tense to past tense as the actual narrative skips from present to past?
I'm a very tolerant reader on the whole, I have no beef with most of the things people have posted about here, as long as I'm entertained I'm usually happy. What does annoy me, somewhat irrationally, is huge leaps in time through a novel. I get twitchy if it skips a year, and if it skips a decade+ I'm likely to get annoyed enough to stop reading. Obviously this is just my personal taste, and no doubt there'll be great books I'll miss out on because of it, but there it is.
It irks me a bit when the writer keeps repeating a certain sentence or a certain word throughout the story. (I'm sure I'm guilty of this myself, though I do try my best to catch any repetitions.) It's irritating to keep reading that a character "pressed her lips" or "hiccoughed" every other paragraph. Or when the same point keeps being made over and over, like they think we may have missed it the first three times. The 'Fallen' series, for example, could probably have been condensed into one book if the writer hadn't repeated herself so much.
I just finished reading Raymond E. Feist's 'Magician'. This fast forwarding of large chunks of time, happens on a number of occasions in the book. The first time it happened it really bugged me and threw me out my stride as I am a detail freak when it comes to stories. (This is why I am very wary about getting into comics as I would probably have to start from the very beginning i.e. the first ever Batman ) However I soon accepted it, as it was the only physical way that you could possibly convey the fact that the events in the story happened over a number of years. Otherwise the book would have ended up being over 5000 pages long and filled with non-eventful matters.
A few annoyances for me: Overly repeated phrases. I read one book where all pauses in the action or speech were "three heartbeats" long. It was awkward to read by the second time it was used, and annoying by the 5th or 6th. POV changes that don't clearly let you know the character whose POV is being used until a page or two into the chapter, leaving you to guess and make incorrect assumptions. I sometimes start mentally assigning attributes related to the action to the wrong character, and then have trouble correcting that view later. I read a lot of fantasy, so there are a couple things related to trilogies that annoy me: Personality changing between book one and book two of a series. Read one where MC was an intelligent and mature young man who accomplished a lot in book one, then went on to be a petulant brat in book 2. Series where each book does not stand alone. It's okay to have sub-plots cross, but I shouldn't be left right in the middle of the action at the end of book one. Novels aren't TV shows. When book 2 of a series spends way too much time reiterating book 1 (in one case it was over 50 pages that contained almost exclusively reiteration).
It might, but not necessarily. Though why? Past tense doesn't mean the action isn't immediate to the reader; it feels like it just happened. When you're describing an event to somebody right after it happened, you use past tense. Very rarely do you get to narrate things as they are happening. For me, present tense is mildly annoying, and doesn't really add anything to the story. Think of it this way. No one who likes present tense dislikes past, but some won't touch present tense stuff at all.
But tbh, I don't understand....you don't even notice the tense of something unless you concentrate on the fact it's present tense. I didn't know Hunger Games was present tense because I read it...I only knew it because I'd read it somewhere beforehand. Along with other present tense books. Unless the writer does something jarring or you concentrate on the tense, you'll find it annoying. That's just my opinion. I don't see much difference in a book despite what tense it uses. But as I said each to their own...Although I find it quite unfair to say present tense is amateurish.
I agree with you. I don't see what's wrong with present tense either. I read short stories in present tense and I didn't even notice until I saw "I say." in a dialogue tag. Hell, the Creative Writing teacher I had said that present tense was preferred over past tense. It's sad that someone wont even read something just because it's in the present tense.
It feels amateurish to some because there is a tendency for it to be a espoused by youngish writers. This is a tendency, not a rule. And the tendency took a massive steroid shot to the arm with the advent of RPGing, in all of its many forms, since its infancy in the 1980's. The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, is written in the present tense and won a Pulitzer, but it was written in the present tense by a hand that knew well what it was doing, was sufficiently versed in the English language as to make of it her plaything. And even then I only got through about 20 pages before I'd had my fill. Amateur writers seem to jump at the present tense in droves and the amateur nature of their writing, in general, taints the way many of us see this mode of writing. Frankly, I start reading a present tense story and I don't like how it feels in my mind. It feels rushed and breathless. It's like a texture issue with food. The taste might be ok, but the way it feels on your tongue... blech! *** Another thing that annoys me is overt author intrusion in the form of "I am from here!". Let me explain: I really like Robert Sawyer as a writer. He delves into some wonderful questioning in his stories and themes that anti-booksnob snobs might detest, but which I love because, yes, I am a card carrying book snob! But... In his The Neanderthal Parallax series, which takes place in his native Canada, he made mention of so many products, places, concepts, things, ideas, that are so uniquely Canadian that I had to look a lot of the stuff up because the mentioning was leaving blanks in my mind's eye. I had no reference to make good the imagery. Halfway through the first of the novels, Hominids, I was like, "Enough! I get it! You're Canadian and proud. You should be. Canada is a beautiful place, but jeez! Enough with the canadian canadianness!"
Fair enough and I semi-agree with you, most people who write present tense are young writers. Some do it well, some don't. But the tone I keep getting from this thread is that if you write in present tense, you're an amateur or if you decide to write in present tense it's because you are an amateur. But that's not always the case. Most annoying present tense stories I've read were fan fiction. Actual published works were not annoying at all. I don't think all present tense writing is bad and people don't always write in present tense because they're amateurs. If you go into a present tense book already thinking 'It's present tense, it's going to be horrible' then it will be...most of the time, because you keep concentrating on it. /Sigh I will shut up now, considering I don't want to go off topic
Some interesting points made there. I dunno, I never really equated the use of present tense to amateurish writing. I guess I'm used to the tense from screenwriting, but I get what you mean. So what makes present tense work when it does?
