I just finished reading a story where the author made just about every mistake in the book. I thought
my writing was bad (and in all honesty, it is), but this guy makes me look like Shakespeare.
This is gonna get long, and I'm sorry, but this story (if you can even call it that) was just so terrible that I've got to vent.
Anyway:
-He constantly repeated himself and didn't know when to summarize or simply leave things to implication.For example, the guy literally repeated every detail, every time, when a character had to pass along information to more than one person. This happened SEVERAL times. Instead of just saying "Bob explained what happened", he had Bob explain what happened. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
It literally gave me headaches.
-Always telling, and never showing.I'm not one of those sticklers that insists on the author ALWAYS showing, but this guy NEVER did. When something happened, it just HAPPENED, no description was ever given of it as it was happening.
-Unrealistic dialogue and relationships.I kind of get the feeling this guy doesn't get out much (and doesn't know how real people talk and relate to each other), because his characters all had identical voices, spoke in perfect grammar, and never used contractions or synonyms. They were also too much alike each other, and agreed on everything, to a point of almost having a hive mentality. It was like watching a bunch of robots come off the same assembly line and try desperately to be human. They would laugh at absolutely nothing, as if they were trying to show emotion but didn't know how.
His portrayal of relationships was... disturbing, at best. If this is how he himself acts in real life, he definitely needs to get some help. EVERYONE in the story was always completely open with their feelings, nobody knew when to shut up, and if any of them knew the meaning of the words "privacy" or "shame", I kind of get the feeling that it was only because some concerned social worker had to come along and drill it into their stupid little heads (which only raises more questions than it answers, people this mentally and socially inept probably should have been taken away somewhere for further treatment
).
On-the-nose dialogue also ran rampant throughout the thing. It was like going through a first grader's reading book.
-"Mary Sues".I'm talking about them in the broader sense of the term. They don't have to be some original character in fan fiction, they can just as easily be an existing character in fan fiction, or a character in an original work. This guy's hero... let's just keep calling him "Bob"... could do no wrong. Everything he did was amazing, everyone around him practically worshiped him, and everything he said was the funniest thing anyone had ever heard. He always got exactly what he wanted, and without putting too much effort into it.
-In that same vein: lack of conflict.Nothing really stood in Bob's way. Or anyone's way, really. Everybody just kind of got along, nothing bad ever really happened in the long run. Everyone agreed on everything, and always knew what was on each others' minds. There
was one interesting plot line involving a character who had some prejudice against Bob, but it was never resolved. I honestly think the author, and I use that term loosely, just forgot about it.
-Confusing character, narrator, and reader knowledge.He seemed to forget (quite often, actually) which characters were privy to what information: in many cases, if anyone knew about something EVERYONE knew about it. This was particularly prevalent towards the end, it was quite obvious that he was rushing to finish the story. Bob was repeating the same information over and over to like 50 different people (AGAIN!), and the reactions of those people were not only virtually identical to one another, but many of them were obviously based on information they were not privy to. It played out kinda like this:
Bob: "Hey Sue, I just won a Ferrari!"
Sue: "Congratulations! Enjoy your new Ferrari!"
Nothing wrong, right? A little on the nose, but there's nothing wrong with it in regards to anybody knowing something they shouldn't. The thing is, the next conversation would go something like this.
Bob: "Hey Mike, I just won a car!"
Mike: "Congratulations! Enjoy your new Ferrari!"
See what I mean? Mike knew it was a Ferrari, even though Bob never told him it was a Ferrari, because the "author" doesn't seem to know the difference between what he knows and what his characters know. Ridiculous.
There were also instances where he didn't go into enough detail. The reader was left hanging because he foolishly assumed they knew exactly what he was talking about from virtually no description at all.
-Writing about something you have no idea about, and acting like like you do. Pretty self-explanatory. It's a matter of both the lack of accuracy and the presumptuousness that set me off. I'm talking about the relationships again (which included a forehead-slapping misrepresentation of the human reproductive process), so I don't think I need to go into more detail than that. I've beat that dead horse enough: the guy is completely clueless when it comes to how human beings relate to one another.
Whether it's fiction or non fiction, if you want to write about something you don't know anything about... RESEARCH IT FIRST. You shouldn't write about Mark Twain if you don't even know that wasn't his real name. More importantly, HAVE THE HUMILITY TO ADMIT WHEN YOU'RE CLUELESS. There's nothing wrong with being wrong once in a while, but if you don't check your facts and at least make an attempt to correct your mistakes, you'll look like a complete jackass.
-Transparency.Transparency can be a very good thing in a lot of areas in life: politics, relationships, and business... but literature isn't one of them. Why should I want to read your story to the end when you beat me over the head with the ending from the beginning? It was so obvious how it was going to end, there were no hints to the contrary, and to add insult to injury, he acted like the ending was this huge surprise. It's called building suspense, pal, you should try it sometime.
That's pretty much it. I'm not even sure why I read the whole thing... I guess because I actually
did like the ideas behind the story? The problem is, no matter how good your ideas are, if the execution is this terrible, people won't be able to enjoy them because they'll be too busy facepalming.
It literally gave me headaches.
).
