Author Habits That Annoy You

[JonnyQuest037]

I posted this a couple weeks ago in the Good Behind the Scenes Books thread, but @Laura Cynthia Chambers pointed out that it would work here too. And since I don't think I've made this complaint in this thread before, here it is:

I'm also not a fan of some of the alien names prose writers come up with, where they're overly long, look like the writer's cat just walked across the keyboard, and have a million apostrophes jammed in there. It just gets exhausting to read a name like "Kkkk't'lll'skyll'dwalis'pk'pk" dozens of times over the course of a novel.

 

[Tosk]

I'm also not a fan of some of the alien names prose writers come up with, where they're overly long, look like the writer's cat just walked across the keyboard, and have a million apostrophes jammed in there. It just gets exhausting to read a name like "Kkkk't'lll'skyll'dwalis'pk'pk" dozens of times over the course of a novel.

I agree!

[...] please do not give them all crazy hard to read/spell names that are similar to each other. I absolutely understand why they would if they're all from the same new species, but it still makes reading about them less pleasurable.

It's tricky though, because the scene where someone says, "X'theniqh-Tarfflen? ...I think I'll call you Lenny." is often awful.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Then there's snickers when a character learns what the full name of an alien who previously called themselves by a nickname is. "I can see why you changed it."

 

[JD]

I posted this a couple weeks ago in the Good Behind the Scenes Books thread, but @Laura Cynthia Chambers pointed out that it would work here too. And since I don't think I've made this complaint in this thread before, here it is:

I'm also not a fan of some of the alien names prose writers come up with, where they're overly long, look like the writer's cat just walked across the keyboard, and have a million apostrophes jammed in there. It just gets exhausting to read a name like "Kkkk't'lll'skyll'dwalis'pk'pk" dozens of times over the course of a novel.

Yeah, that bugs me too. It's not funny or clever, it's just irritating.

 

[Trek Survivor]

Not specific to one author (though most recently it turned up in "Exiles" by Howard Weinstein) but early TNG authors had a preoccupation with Data "cocking his head" (inquisitively/curiously/intrigued etc) and also people's fingers "dancing across the console". Overused phrases/imagery can be a bit annoying.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Not specific to one author (though most recently it turned up in "Exiles" by Howard Weinstein) but early TNG authors had a preoccupation with Data "cocking his head" (inquisitively/curiously/intrigued etc) and also people's fingers "dancing across the console". Overused phrases/imagery can be a bit annoying.

I can see why they did that, though, as those are both specific physical mannerisms that Brent Spiner brought to the character. It's not a bad thing to try and paint an image of the actor who portrays a character in your head. If they phased it the exact same way every time, though, that's a bit much.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

If the reader is familiar with the production and said character's mannerisms, they can imagine extra details based on what they've already seen of the character. New characters created for the story have less to go on, unless they're compared to someone the reader does know of (i.e. "he was just like his father in that regard")

 

[JD]

That reminds me of one, and I apologize if I mentioned this before, but it drives me crazy when the author doesn't describe a character right when they introduce them. It's annoying when you suddenly discover the character you've been picturing as a black Bajoran for 100+ pages is actually a white Vulcan (this was just a random example I just made up, that specific situation hasn't happened with anything I've read). Or the Andorian with a buzz cut, is actually a Cardassian with hair down past her butt.

 

[Set Harth]

"Waiter, I ordered a Black Bajoran!"

 

[Christopher]

That reminds me of one, and I apologize if I mentioned this before, but it drives me crazy when the author doesn't describe a character right when they introduce them.

I prefer to describe characters early on, but sometimes it would be awkward to stop everything the moment a character enters to give a full description, so there's a balance to be struck. It's particularly tricky to describe what the viewpoint character in a scene looks like. Having them think about their reflection in a mirror or window is kind of a cliche. Sometimes you can do it by contrast, like in "No Dominion" where I had the narrator mention that the male lead had brown skin a few shades lighter than her own.

Some authors prefer to leave character descriptions to the reader's imagination, though.

 

[JD]

Oh yeah, I understand where it could be awkward to stop and go into a detailed description as soon the character is introduced, but some books go way to long without given any indication of what characters look like.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I thought I was doing an adequate job of describing my protagonist, her parents, her eventual mentor, and the figures in a number of large stained-glass windows.

Until my editor told me I needed more. And so I added more. Including the figures in the stained-glass windows.

It's particularly tricky to describe what the viewpoint character in a scene looks like.

I got around that by describing my protagonist before the readers had a chance to climb inside her head.

 

[Christopher]

I got around that by describing my protagonist before the readers had a chance to climb inside her head.

By modern convention, every scene is from some character's point of view, so there's always going to be one character in a scene whose eyes the reader is looking out of, so you can't describe that character (short of the mirror cliche or a stilted self-description) without starting a new scene from a different character's POV.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I frequently use "Third Person Fly-On-The-Wall" POV. Indeed, my "hit-and-run fiction" piece about a classroom full of "Lottery Virgins" encountering Shirley Jackson's masterpiece for the first time even lampshades this, given that it's title is "The Fly on the Classroom Wall."

(Said opus is so short that I customarily set it in a large point-size, but not so large that it fills even a single page, in order to emphasize its extreme shortness, hence my term "hit-and-run fiction."

And the opening of my novel slowly trucks in from that POV to a POV so close to my protagonist that I'm inviting the reader to climb inside her head.

Here's a heavily redacted version of that opening. Getting indented paragraphs in BBCode is a royal pain in the butt.

It was a warm Sunday morning in the Spring of 1969. The University community was anxiously awaiting the launch of Apollo 10, along with all of Springfield, . . . .
Jennifer was a fresh-faced toddler who shared her parents’ fair skin, and her mother’s finely-drawn features. Her brown hair already fell nearly to her shoulders in thick, fluffy waves, and her clear blue eyes seemed to take in everything.
The nursery room, and half the Sunday School rooms, had all been painted a few days earlier, and nobody wanted to expose the kids (or anybody else) to the fumes, so Jennifer was not the only toddler in church that morning. . . .
<paragraph omitted>
She looked up in the other direction. She saw two big wooden cabinets, high in back, one in front of the other. They had shiny things in front, things that gleamed like Mommy’s pots and pans, only they were tall and skinny. . . .
As unfamiliar as everything was, Jennifer had this strange feeling she’d been in this room before. It was a memory that was connected with being splashed with cool water on a hot day. She wondered if that would happen again.
. . .

So the readers see what she looks like, at the age of 22 months, before I invite them to climb inside her head. This being 1969, I have an explanation for (1) why many mainstream Protestant denominations didn't have toddlers in their services (that wouldn't change for a few years), and (2) why she was on that particular Sunday (latex paint was still being perfected, and not something you'd typically find in a church or a commercial or government building).

And the fact that I frequently invoke an intentionally-lame pun about Jackson being "stoned" when she wrote "The Lottery" does not in any way lessen my appreciation for how she manages to foreshadow everything without telegraphing anything. Nor does it imply any lack of understanding that it's a humorless satire about what people will do simply because it's "what we've always done."

 

[Set Harth]

Shirley Jackson's masterpiece

I always used to wonder why they made us read that in school.

I don't anymore.

 

[JD]

This conversation about character descriptions got me thinking about something with Lives of Dax. Did ever see what any of the pre-Jadzia Dax hosts looked like, other than Joran and Curzon?

 

[Christopher]

This conversation about character descriptions got me thinking about something with Lives of Dax. Did ever see what any of the pre-Jadzia Dax hosts looked like, other than Joran and Curzon?

I think the only place they've ever been depicted was a story in an anthology comic IDW did some years back, symbolically showing them speaking to Ezri to help her work her way through a dangerous situation.

 

[bdub76]

Non-linear stories bug me the most. The last one that really bugged me was God of the Woods. Way too much jumping around.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Some authors prefer to leave character descriptions to the reader's imagination, though.

Yeah, and then, in the sequel, the character ends up on the cover!

I remember being shattered when I finally saw illustrations of Tolkien's hobbits. I first had a chapter read to me in class, with no frame of reference that Tolkien's words.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Some authors prefer to leave character descriptions to the reader's imagination, though.

For which movie adaptation casting directors thank them profusely, no doubt.