And I don’t mean the obvious problems of bad grammar, bad spelling, and et cetera. I mean certain preferences and habits that you’ve formed over your lifetime of reading things. Aversions that you’ve developed or tropes you’ve noticed you dislike. For example, I have a friend who “nopes out” any time a love triangle is introduced: the trope annoys him too much, and he feels it’s overused. Another won’t read anything with overcomplex names, like N’yanfortvi. It’s all a matter of personal preference, of course, but there’s usually some underlying reason, as well.
What are the things in fiction that turn you off, make you roll your eyes, or make you go “oh, hell, no”? They can be minuscule things that just bother you, or hard rules that make you set down the work as soon as those rules are broken. I’ve put down some of my own to share, though I’ll probably add more as I think of them. I’m really interested to hear if others have preferences and dislikes and rules of their own, and how they came to be or what the reasoning is behind them! Hopefully it can help foster discussion and thought about our own writing as well, whether it be CS or otherwise.
As for me, my big no-no’s are:
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Stories that start with dream sequences. (Exception: if the dream has great and tangible significance later on, this is okay. I just dislike dreams that introduce high-action, high-stake scenes as red herrings, only for them to never matter later on.)
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Stories that end with the revelation that it was all a dream…
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“Bathtub” stories: stories in which no action actually occurs, and the character sits in one place (often a bathtub) and just thinks about some stuff before the story ends. Sometimes stories can do this well (I think Borgias wrote one where a guy was trying to put on his sweater?) but I usually lose interest by that point, anyway.
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Stories where breasts are compared to fruit: “melon-like tits,” “breasts like gently-sloping avocados.” (Now hear me out on this one… those are real quotes. I used to work as an assistant editor for a lit mag, and you wouldn’t believe the number of submissions we got that did this! It was an actual thing. “Here’s another fruit-breast comparison…” I can’t do it anymore)
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Stories about someone remorselessly cheating on their partner and having great sex with their mistress/side-man. And then that’s it. That’s the end. Essentially what we called “affair fantasy porn.” Also happened a lot—and no, I didn’t work for a porn mag!
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Stories where characters say “lol,” “jk,” or “rofl” out loud
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Stories in which characters are unironically racial stereotypes, and talk and act that way constantly. The character of Lee in Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a good subversion of this: he often talks in broken English or “pidgin,” but this is all a ploy to get people to underestimate him and talk freely in his presence. He’s actually a deeply-philosophical scholar who plays an integral role in guiding the characters of the story. It’s only on the surface that he seems to be the stereotypical “Chinaman.”
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Stories in which a female protagonist is a helpless, shy, fragile, or weak “damsel in distress,” and stays that way throughout the end of the story.
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This is oddly-specific but any story that is an allegory for going to the bathroom. I also taught a creative writing class for a few years and a student wrote many drafts of a story in which soldiers in brown uniforms parachuted out of a dimensional hole in the sky, only to find they had landed mistakenly in an ocean and were drowning. All of their names were a variation of Sergeant T. Urd…
Anyway, let’s hear everyone else’s thoughts!