If
you’re an author, you read. And if you
read as an author, you’re bound to be more critical than Jane Doe who’s just
picked up a book for enjoyment. Or maybe
not…. I’m not sure because I’ve taught
English Language at university level, been an editor, and
worked for Simon and Schuster so being critical is really ingrained in me. You can probably therefore guess that my pet
peeves include bad grammar and lousy punctuation. Over the years, I’ve loosened up on the
amount of commas necessary in a sentence for clarity, but I remain fairly
strict. I’ve been told that in fiction
we should use emdashes instead of semi-colons, but that doesn’t sit well with
me: an emdash is for an interrupted thought;
a semi-colon is for a secondary idea of the same thought expressed in the
sentence. Yup, it gets complicated.
But
now, I’ve got new pet peeves. I hate,
hate, hate anachronisms in historical books.
For me, it’s sloppy research and there’s no excuse for it. When writing an historical book I work with
the on-line etymological dictionary. Of
course, you have to think, ‘does this word need to be looked up?’ and mistakes
happen. But did someone really think a
woman would refer to a man’s abs in the 1880s?
Or discuss accessorizing a
dress? And then there’s referring to a song in the 1860s when the song wasn’t
written until the 1920s. But then maybe I shouldn’t be so annoyed about that;
I’ve been watching the series, ‘Underground’ about the underground railway
prior to the Civil War, and they keep playing ‘Summertime’ penned by Gershwin
in 1935.
Someone
once criticized a book of mine because I had a character briefly speak. like. this.
We do it to emphasize what the character is saying and how he/she says it. Personally, I don’t see a problem but this
obviously annoyed my reader. My publisher has a stipulation that the hero and
heroine should generally meet within the first four pages. An author friend told me she disliked books
where the h/h weren’t described early on, and another author wrote she hated reading about "a single tear" making its way. She demanded, 'who has a single tear?' And then we ask ourselves what’s the inner conflict? What’s the goal/motivation/conflict of the
story? Is there character development?
Does the story move along and make sense—is it properly constructed? Goodness, there’s a minefield out there of
things to dislike. And that’s before we even get to the love/sex scenes and how
they’re described and their length (OF THE SCENE!)
But
as I’ve learned from being in three anthologies now, some things will eat at
one reader and not in the least bother the next, while the book will hit the
wall in the room of yet another reader.
So
what are your pet peeves? What do you
absolutely hate to find in a story when reading, whether it is in the basics of
good English or the construction of the story itself. And please let me know if any of them are in Bad
Boy, Big Heart.
I
aim to please.
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| Available at https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Boy-Big-Heart-Book-ebook/dp/B072MKG48B/ |
