Michael

Another pet peeve I have is self-harm or suicide stories. I mean no offense to anyone who writes or enjoys them, but I detest self-harm/suicide stories. They're either something like, "Everyone hates me; nobody cares; feel sorry for me; I'll just cut myself (or kill myself) and that'll show them," or they're just posting self-harm or suicide stories because it's supposedly popular. Yuck. I'm always tempted to suggest that the person or character just do the readers a favor and go ahead and do it.

And the last pet peeve is over-use of formatting. Bold, italics, and underlines are helpful for emphasis, but when every line has some sort of emphasis or whole lines are bolded or underlined, it's just annoying. Whole lines of italics are useful, so I don't mind those.

Alot of these are being done by teenage girls.

The repetitive plot i hate the most is the 'falling in love w/ vampire' storyline, but Yaoi (that's how it's spelled, right?) ** me off here. They have sites for that... Somewhere, probably.

And either incredible long or incredibly short entries that respectively come one every day or one every month.

I also hate spelling and grammar mistakes. Spelling not so much because you can usually figure out what they meant to say but grammar is just annoying. Most people here should have a program that offers spellcheck, and if you don't I suggest you read it over or download a program that does have spellcheck. Its different if English is not your first language, because grammar rules vary from language to language, but if English is your first language then please please people pay more attention in Language Arts class!

Really short chapters annoy me. They are usually not very well written and follow some plotline that makes no sense whatsoever. People who write these especially bug me because they all they are doing is writing a few poorly written sentences and posting it. Some people actually put effort into their stories, and even though we don't have 135 chapters, we still have 3 that are 10 times longer then all of yours!

Stories in just dialog or script form. These are annoying, they have absolutely no description and its hard to imagine the scene in your head, which is crucial for read and writing.

A lot of that had to do with the change in formatting that happened a few years ago.

Text files now require spaces between paragraphs in order for there to be any paragraph breaks.

Michael

Choppy sentences. The ones that make you feel as though you were driving on a road with too many speed bumps. Bad spelling and grammar as well as incorrectly formatted dialogue.

Fragments. Not really.

- Edit ten months later: fix'd grammar error.

You can check Wikipedia for a big article and lots of related links. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

Trivia: In most Mexican telenovelas, the main female character is the epitome of a Mary Sue.

whether it be in the language, the characters or the plotline. it just gets irritating trying to sift through the enormous amounts of crap on this site to get to the more original work.

Do you have an example of that?

Michael

These are true enough examples, but you can't complaine about these things "being old" or "getting anoying" when refering to LoTR, because it came first. So they wern't old or repeditive ideas when LoTR was written. :P lol.... Really though, I get your point. This type of thing anoys the crap out of me too.

~Marjorie

~Marjorie

For me the real trick is to find something original and not done in the tradition of works that have been published before. Right now they’re a lot of LOTR's stories, or those done in that tradition. There's a lot more to fantasy than that.

Now, I shall go on a rant about what someone (sorry, I forget who) called "lofty language". It can be found in stories, but I see it more often in poetry. The writer will use gigantic, obscure words that the average person doesn't know just to sound smart. And of course, since they use such huge words, everyone around them thinks it's brilliant because they don't want to admit that they have no clue what the poem/story is about. I saw it happen when I took a creative writing class back in high school. I read this one girl's poem and I was completely lost. (She later explained that it was about riding on a train. There wasn't even a remote mention of anything train-like.) Of course it was published in the school's literary magazine and was considered the best poem on there. What. The. Heck. So poets (or any writers who try to write things as frilly as possible), please make yourselves understandable. And don't tell me that I'm too simple-minded to comprehend your fancy words because, really, you probably don't understand what they mean, either. Poetry is about showing. If your language is overly-complex when it doesn't need to be, you're not showing anything.

Sorry if I offended anyone with my rant. I'm not trying to direct it at anyone here. I just had to get it off my chest. And now that it's off, I feel better. ^_^

I can understand this to a certain extent. Yes when people use overly obscure language without real thought to meaning, it can be irritating and stupid. I've seem it happen and I've confronted people about it. About 75% of the time, they haven't had a clue about the real meaning of the language they were using.

However don't dismiss all "lofty language" that the other twenty five percent know how to use. No offence to you but I'm sure you are not the smartest person in the room, for that fact neither am I but there is no reason to tell the smartest person in the room to dumb down their language.

Get what I mean? If people use that language appropriately and with understanding of not only the word but the context in their work surrounding it then don't tell them to "make it understandable" which to me just means "dumb it down". Otherwise, we'll be stuck using the same language and the same words over and over again. There's more than six hundred thousand words in the English language and I think we should do it justice at the very least.

At One-Track-Mind:writing is writing. There should not be any type of seperation between shonen ai/yaoi and heterosexual romance. Love is love no matter what form it's in.

But anyway: I hate vampires. There is just too much vampire fiction on this site, and too few variations in their plots. I hope Stephanie Meyer has a very dark place in writer's hell set aside for her, because she seems to be partly responsible for it. Not wholly, by any means, but check the profiles of the authors of the worst of it; inevitably, "Twilight" will be on their list of favorite books, and they've done the literary equivalent of a skin change, changing three names and the location and posting "Twilight" fanfiction on this site.

(Note: my only posted story prominently features vampires as antagonists, and two more works of mine underway will feature them in sympathetic roles. That's what I mean by "hypocrisy".)

Info-dumping; excessive details thrown into the text where they break up the momentum.

(You know I'm guilty of that as well.)

Lofty language, to an extent. If a polysyllabic word will cut out a ten word phrase for a description and it's used the in right context, fine; I've a good vocabulary, and admire succinctness. But if an author is just saying "Hey! Look at me! I own a thesaurus!", then we have a problem (guilty.) Furthermore, if the syntax is too complicated, and disrupts the flow of the story, I hate that (again, guilty of that.)

Conversely, I hate seeing characters that are supposed to me immortal beings, but have the vocabularies and speech patterns of 15 year old girls; I always wonder how that effect comes about... If a character is supposed to have existed since before the time of Christ, he'd better speak as if he'd finished high school; otherwise you've got functional incoherence, and it kills the suspension of disbelief(oddly enough, not a vice of mine).

I despise villain Sues; works in which the antagonist is less attractive than the protagonist, less capable, and just all around unable to pose a threat to the hero in any conceivable way. There's just no conflict then; no one wants to see a movie where Vin Diesel brutally kills Ashton Kutcher at the climax... Well, *I* would, but I'm also deeply maladjusted. (yes, you guessed it, big problem of my work.)

I hate fantasy with magic systems plucked fully formed from Role Playing Games; if I can see a character's Mana Guage falling when they cast a spell... no. Just no. In the real world, there at dozens of magic systems developed around the world, at the very least, that operate on entirely different principles; from the basic principle of harming an enemy's effigy to injure them via some type of transitive property, to the innate magical properties of certain elements and herbs, to enlisting the aid of higher powers or demons. I wish a few more fantasy writers would research and draw inspiration from such sources.

And finally,I *hate* to see stories with a clumsy number of protagonists, all introduced in the first chapter, introductions complete with extensive biographies. Has any professional author *ever* done that? I've not seen it done by: Gaiman, Gibson, King, Koontz, Michener, Clavell, Steinbeck, Jeter, Noon, Palahniuk, Sheldon, Crichton, Harris, Hamilton, Card, Nix, Pullman, or any novelist who's story I've read in the past year. And yet, on this site, it is so dreadully common to see a chapter start off with "Around me were Mary Sue, Gary, Larry, Marty, Kay, Sleepy, Bashful, Kramer, and Jerry", followed by exhausting descriptions of each...

I seem to be ranting now... I'll stop.

The main pet peeves of mine include grammar mistakes (well, doesn't everybody think this?), repetitive word choice (I tend to do this a lot - sorry about that), and a plot that revolves around the same focus point and doesn't seem to go anywhere.

Bad spelling. Bad grammar I don't notice as much but simple spelling mistakes that could be fixed with spell check or something like that just really irk me. It's like, "Dude, do you have spell check?" I just hate bad spelling. It's like, if you don't proof read it at all then why bother post it honestly? Proof read it, then post it. MAKE SURE YOU SPELL CHECK IT! Jeeze. It's not that hard lol.

-Kelli

Concerning this site, I must say that sometimes trying to read what others have written becomes more of a chore than an indulgence, as most of the writers who use this site tend to punish any potential viewer with excessively amateurish, badly written and mistake laden monstronsities. I mean, one of the categories we get to choose is "manga" but, really it's been generally terrible since I first signed up. I'd gripe about things like stories with one giant paragraph, but that has more to do with site formatting and well... that's a different topic. Honestly, I have more to gripe about involving the functionality of the site than I do about the downpour of awful goth poetry and the infuriating amount of bad comedy stories. And the nigh parylizing wannabe "manga" fan scribes, those are horribly painful.

Hm...my pet peeves, let's see...

1.) Choppy, rushed sentences. (Ex: Jacob saw the man. He screamed. The man was ugly. The man pulled a gun out and shot. Jacob dodged it.) Believe it or not i find alot of this on fictionpress, and even though action scenes are suppossed to be quick paced, they are NOT supposed to be like THAT (and then there's the stories like that even outside of the action sequences, those are just suicide inducing horrors). I would much prefer something like: Jacob twisted his gaze to the door as it bolted open. He let out a yelp of surprise as the cumbersome assailant rammed his way into the room. Disfiguring scars ripped across his hideous face and he grinned as he pulled out his loaded revolver. With a sound like thunder the bullets raced through the air, barely skimming Jacob's left arm. Now i know i'm not all that great of a writer, but that only took me a couple of seconds, couldn't other people at least try?

2.) Short chapters, okay, i'll admit, i don't exactly write long ones, but alot on here are just WAY too short. I'd say a decent length is anything above fifteen hundred words and below maybe six thousand, though overly long chapters aren't as much of a bother. Most of my chapter range the two thousand scale, but it just annoys me to such a large extent when people write a two hundred word chapter and call it done!

3.) When people don't separate paragraphs! Does anyone have any idea, how hard it is, to read a five thousand word chapter, when everything is bunched up into a SINGLE paragraph? I'd say if there's not at least a new paragraph every ten sentences, it's annoying. And please, for Pete's sake (who's Pete anyways?) make a new paragraph when a different person is talking!

mixing homophones like yours and your's and it's and its.

As soon as I see mistakes like that, I bail.

It drives me off the wall!

One of my major pet peeves is the word formatting itself. Like once I upload a document onto the site, the formatting is completely different in the preview than from what it originally was in the document itself. Whether it be repeated phrases out of NOWHERE, a lack of paragraph breaks, or random numbers listed on the bottom! I have to re-preview and re-edit several times, sometimes even being forced to reload a story altogether in the case of a one-shot, just because of this odd formatting. I don't understand it!

Other than that, completely transparent characters. Where the girl is "just your typical teenage girl", who falls in love with the "typical teenage boy", and there doesn't seem to be very deep characterization at all, just characters playing in a fixed, usually obvious plot.

And when it's a little toooo evident that the author didn't take the time to stop and proofread. Even once.

Well, I don't even read these, but stories that are comprised almost entirely of dialog. A clear sign of shoddy writing really. There has to be some movement action and description, PLEASE! NB: I understand you do get the odd "arty" story that's meant to be that way... But they're few and far between and I haven't actually come across any on this site.

Oh... Damn! Lost it. Something more specific to FF.com, but still here, are comedies where ALL the humour stems from random events. Just having wacky c**p happening does not constitute humour. An occasional bit of oddity, to highlight how mundane a situation is, is fine; but it can't be the sole method of delivering a laugh.

I'm sick of heriones with "rebellious princess syndrome". Whether she's refusing to wear "ladylike" clothing or running away from an arranged marriage, the whole concept is is completely exhausted.

And summaries that say "I suck at summaries. Read and review anyway." Um, no.

I greatly dislike it when the authors are talking to their characters before/after the chapter. I used to do that, I'll admit, but it soon grated on my nerves even writing it. I also don't like when authors proclaim that they won't update till they get xx number of reviews. I also like when good stories never get finished. It's nice to find a story that's really good; it's not nice to find out that the author's stopped writing it halfway through the plot.

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