Earned and unearned

[mrissa]

I put down Sarah Hoyt's Ill Met by Moonlight last week after reading a chapter and a half. It was not entirely Hoyt's fault. It may not have been mostly Hoyt's fault. Here's the thing: William Shakespeare was a major character. Not just anybody gets to have Shakespeare as a character and keep my eyes nailed to the page. You have to earn it. Like, say, with three or four other books I've loved, or a close friendship. Or...no, that's pretty much it.

Everybody has hot buttons as a reader. Everybody has things they don't want to read about unless there's a really good reason; everybody has squids (stuff they definitely want to read about with the slightest excuse). A bad enough writer can ruin your squids, and a good enough writer can earn the hot buttons. Still: oof.

Here are some things a writer must earn the right to use and still have me read the story:
Shakespeare as a character
John Dee same
Tesla same
King Arthur
superstring theory in any form
orbs
parallel universes interacting in the story
vampires
anything that resembles a hobbit (especially if it's not called a "hobbit")
any being with pointed ears
any alien with apostrophes in its name
any human with apostrophes in its name (yes, I know, I go by M'ris; the apostrophe is entirely optional, and anyway I also have a bio of Tesla on my shelves; real life is different)
song lyrics written by the author
an entire story structured around song lyrics written by someone else (different from "inspired by a lyric")
anything related to the US Civil War, up to and including Great-Granddad's rifle
Freemasons
a main character who is a writer
a main character who "wishes" he/she was "still" a writer but who has been blocked
teenagers whose clothes are as cool as the author desperately wished her (or his, but let's be real here: her) clothes were in high school
teenagers who use improbable dialect
anyone with a stutter, drawl, or brogue spelled phonetically, particularly if it's done wrong: I have had friends with each of same, and they do not actually sound like that
excessive similes

Oh, lordy, that one jolts me right out of the list, because Ill Met by Moonlight had William Shakespeare, his plays as an aspect of reality, and the similes, heaven help me, the similes. They were so carefully period. "His thoughts tumbled through his mind like the extremely period fool he'd seen at the extremely period village fair in Well-Researched Local Town." Yeah, and her thoughts flew like a book flying through the air into the trash can.

So anyway, what are some of your hot buttons? What elements does a writer have to earn? What has to be incredibly well-handled to get over your automatic dislike?

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Governments which operate much better than any real-life government.

Alternate history in which the outcome of one battle changes the outcome of a war. Extra demerits if that battle is Gettysburg.

Military leaders who never make mistakes; though I'll accept that if magic is involved.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Funny, I'm less likely to accept mistake-free military leaders if magic is involved, because there are more variables and also the magic looks like it could very easily be a crutch or a blind spot.

I'm more the other way with alternate histories: I get frustrated when the "one change" doesn't change enough. The Roman Empire never fell...but somehow Thomas Jefferson was still born and became a polymath and did important things! Yah. WhatEVer.

Almost every alternate history I read is like this. Authors (damned idiotic things, authors) can't seem to resist sticking their favorite historical figures in them for cameos, even when it makes no damn sense for the historical figure in question to exist at all, much less in their famous form. It's beyond determinism into fate and destiny, is what, and I'll have none of it.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

M'ris?

Please don't read my Shakespeare book. *g* kthxbye!

More seriously, I didn't like either of the two Hoyt books I read, but it was more a plot and prose style issue than a historical character issue.

I have a list of hot buttons as long as your arm. Unearned happy endings are high on it, so are ugly duckling stories. (ugly girl turns beautiful, gets guy.) (So of course I wrote myself into a plot corner where the ugly girl had to turn, at least, plain, but I did try to deconstruct it a bit in passing. :-P)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Did I not say multiple books I'd loved? Did I not? And was not friendship also on the list, hmmmmmmmmm?

The prose was not my thing, but I didn't read far enough to find out about the plot.

Are unearned unhappy endings also no good?

[platypus]

Any wackiness of punctuation, tense or capitalization requires some serious justification, and it had damn well better happen quickly. My library gets a lot of "popular reading" books, varying wildly from trashy but popular bestsellers to current works of fairly well-respected literature. I often place holds on them based on a one-paragraph blurb in the catalog. This often proves to be a bad idea. Once, I picked up one of my holds only to find that the author did not believe in using quotation marks or question marks. He was apparently okay with periods and commas, but I didn't last long enough to see if there were semicolons. Present tense is a huge hurdle that a very good story may overcome; on very, very rare occasions I may be able to warily tolerate a book that switches tenses for backstory.

I'm fond of reading first efforts by non-famous fantasy/sci-fi authors, but a lot of them use impossible-to-remember (or mentally pronounce) character names. I'm not crazy about italicized terms from other languages within the fantasy universe, or unusual punctuation meant to designate mental telepathy. A book I recently read had a class of magicians called ahalad-kaaslane. This term appeared hundreds of times in the book, whole and italicized every goddamn time. Could the author not come up with something a little shorter? I bet she had a macro for typing it. I suppose I should have known better -- going into the book, I knew it was about people who telepathically bond with talking animals. But I am a little bit of a sucker for stories like that, because there is a part of me that is still thirteen.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I, too, require quotation marks and question marks.

You know, I have a hard time believing in something like ahalad-kaaslane from a linguistic standpoint. People don't call them "kaaslanes" or "ahalads" or "allis" or something? It's not even that the author couldn't have come up with something shorter, it's that "ahalad-kaaslane" is a mouthful to use regularly for an entire class of people.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

Talking animals who bond with their person and are more human than animal.

Child characters who act more like adults then children.

Neat and tidy endings to highly conflicted and complex plots.

Authors who lose interest in their own works before the trilogy is completed.

Authors who have too much interest in their own works and continue the story even when it's long over.

"Moral of the story" stories.

Fantasy that is derivative and predictable.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also, child characters who act like idealized children instead of real adults or real children. Disingenuous Victorian confusion of ignorance and innocence.

[loup_noir]

Continuing from a discussion in buymeaclue's journal: unnecessary relationships. Just because there is more than one character in a story does not mean that there has to be a romance involved. Can't people be friends/acquaintances/not interested?

Long descriptions of clothing. Hate it. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care. This piggybacks onto female protagonists with weird eye colors, hair down to their butts, and too sexy for their whatevers.

20th century mindsets on previous eras' characters. The plucky female character who seems to head most historical fiction drives me insane.


The corollary is the cloistered religious who blithely waltzes out of the monastery/abbey all the time.

Eleanor of Aquitaine has to be earned, dammit. Likewise, Jehanne d'Arc.

Cutsey talking animals with human motivations.

Whiny protagonists.

Protagonists with dopey made-up names or descriptive ones like Saffira of the Wicked-Cool Knives.

Hot buttons. Whoa. Too many. However, that doesn't seem to slow down my book buying much.

[platypus]

Oh, one of my favorites: characters who look into mirrors and describe themselves, because the author cannot bear to creep into omniscience enough to tell us what we need to know.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

Any story in which a cat is a major character. I'm okay with catlike aliens, I'll even swallow telepathic "treecats" although it was a hard swallow, but that's it.

Elves.

Future history in which the plot mirrors past history right down to the too-cutesy names. (David Weber, I'm looking at you.)

Genocide by cultures that the writer considers the good guys, which goes unremarked and unregretted. (Alan Foster, this means you.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There was one -- ummm, Robin Hobb, maybe? -- character who had telepathy with animals, and the cat was always thinking things like, "Pet the cat!" and "Food for the cat!" Which is much better than the "cats are aloof and mysterious and thinking deep thoughts" meme. (Also not a major character.)

The main problem I remember with David Weber -- and I haven't read any of these books since college -- is that he's like freakin' Batman: you can tell who's good and who's bad by how they look.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If I open a book in the bookstore and the first page has more than say, two words starting with Portentious Capital Letters, then I put it back.

Repeat the above, substituting "words in italics" for "Portentious Capital Letters."

Present tense.

Plot points hinging on votes and dull politicking.

Plots that involve political parties of any sort - fantasy and historical as well as contemporary.

Talking animals. Animals that walk upright.

Telepathy in any way, shape, form, or fashion.

Aliens, elves, or human tribes that are thinly-disgusied versions of the Noble Savage myth.

Painfully obvious environmental axes to gind, especially since most of them are simplistic.

Humans and aliens in love.

Elves that are nothing more than humans with pointy ears, attitudes, and good hair. As a corollary to that, elves and elflike creatures that owe more to bastardizations of Tolkien and RPGs than to actual European fairy legends.

Most alternate history.

Women in medieval societies that have modern attitudes towards gender roles without a corresponding modern pharmeceutical toolkit of reliable contraceptives. Also, any nobleperson who has modern attitudes towards the plight of the poor and working class without a corresponding social or religious background woven into the society.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I love politics and politicking. The Kestrel was very nearly my ideal book for awhile, all blood and politics. I now also like sex, and it doesn't have to relate to either blood or politics. See how open-minded I become in my old age?

My friend Zed is a passionate environmentalist and has said that that's why he doesn't feel he can write environmentalist fiction, at least not yet. I respect that a lot.

[ellarien]

Vampires -- I'll take those from Barbara Hambly, Robin McKinley, and Terry Pratchett, but hardly anyone else.

King Arthur and friends.

Disposable guards, on either side. Disposable horses.

Ancient evil stirring after generations of peace -- anything along those lines in the blurb is likely to get a new fantasy author put right back on the shelf.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Have you tried Agyar? It's not my favorite Brust, but it's quite readable. Also, Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends amused me. (I can't believe I'm recommending specifically vampire fiction.)

I think the thing I don't really believe about the ancient evil stirring after generations of peace is the generations of peace. Probably sad.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Bitchy, Know-it-all important female characters
Groups of characters who save the entire world/universe/whatever more than once
Sequels about the first crop of characters' direct descendents.
The use of the word "smithy" to refer to a person rather than a place.
Phonetic spellings of perfectly sensible words. "Should of"
Characters who are the absolute Best.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Are bitchy, know-it-all important male characters okay?

A term for the Absolute Best characters is "Mary Sue." Very useful.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Ap'os'tro'phe n'ames that don't make linguistic sense (if there is a genuine glottal stop there, I'm fine with it)--and same with double aa names or ii names. (Unless there is a real reason for them.)

Raven locks. (What the hell is wrong with black hair?)

John Dee. (What about Paracelsus? Melancthon? Agrippa? At least Nostradamus has gone out of fashion, thank goodness.)

Any sword, path, or crown of destiny. Or fate.

Dirty cities of eternal night where there don't seem to be anything but thirty-somethings in terminally cool clothes, who are all revolutionaries, except for the incredibly ugly bad guys who all work either for gangsters or for the corrupt bourgeoisie. I mean, doesn't anyone run a laundromat? A preschool? Doesn't anyone wear, like, pink?

Dragons and vampires (Jo Walton and Barbara Hambly made me love their dragon stories--and Robin McKinley and Steven Brust their vampires, so What You Said about winning over one's automatic dislike)

Regency era anything that has obviously had its research done from Georgette Heyer

The evial priests in red or black who never conduct a service, see to the poor, or do much of anything but lurk around menacing passing heroes

telepathic animal companions who are more more perfect, wiser, and more powerful than God

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Doesn't anyone wear, like, pink?
Yah, I'm a tough sell on utopias as well.

My current series-in-progress has several aa and ee and ii names. A few yy names. Because that's how Finnish works. Because Meri is not a Finnish name and Meeri is. Riina. Roosa. Tyyne.

I'm okay with Regency era anything that has obviously had its research done from Georgette Heyer if it knows that it's writing about an alternate world in which things were quite, quite different and is funny about it.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I can't deal with names that have bizarre apostrophes and/or overtly cutsey "You Are In A Different World" spellings.

No gratuitous unhappy endings simply because the author things it gives him/her more street cred to be dark.

No gigantic coincidences - I can barely swallow some of the ones in the early Vorkosigan books, and I adore Bujold. So from a writer I don't trust? Not a chance.

Main characters who make really stupid assumptions that the whole plot hinges on. I read a book about a woman who wished to go back to the days of the Roman Empire...because women had more freedom and people were more enlightened than they are in modern America. So of course, she gets her chance and oh, goodness! Turns out they aren't! Who would have thought! Cue grinding teeth noises here.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

I read that book (the return-to-Roman-Empire one)! But it could have been worse... the author could have written a story in which she was right. As it is, the point at which the protagonist realizes that she's having a romantic relationship with the tanner, who smells distinctly of stale piss most of the time, was precious.

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

Teenagers Doing Embarassing Things. I had an embarassing enough adolesence, I don't need to read about somebody else's.

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

protagonists (or worse, all the characters) are Artists
sound effects - make the book go THUD
characters who make incredibly stupid decisions (like the Roman book mentioned above)

probably other stuff I'll remember later

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to think about the main question, but in the meantime I'd like to note that your apostrophe is cricket because it's legitimately replacing letters.

[ktempest.livejournal.com]

Rape is one of my hot buttons, and this is a product of having to read slush for a magazine that accepts horror. So often rape is used (misused!) as a shortcut to convey that one character is BAD and therefore deserves his/her (mostly his) horrible fate because he's a rapist! or to convey that a woman is STRONG because she was raped but is okay now and stronger for it and will, in the end, kill that nasty being that raped her!! (this does not apply to tentacle hentai, of course) Like any short cut, this rarely ever works well. I realize that rape happens, and that, in some stories/novels, it can be a perfectly legitimate part of the plot or character background. But I am not alone in thing that it is way overused (misused!) in fiction.

Things a writer has to earn... hmm... well, any cliche is going to drive me nuts. in fact, I was just reading a novel full of cliches and such. but I still enjoyed it on some level, so i guess the writer earned them. i may have to thinka bout this part for a while.

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

Wow, just read through all these and realized I'm a very forgiving reader. But here are a few of mine. :)

-Dark Lord (Ancient Evil) rising after 100000000000 years Just Because (hey, I'd rather a *character* was responsible for the Ancient Evil coming back!).

-Ugly bad guys

-Totally TEH HOT!!!11!!! bad guys

-Perfect protags (perfect characters in general, I guess)

-Bad guys with *no* redeaming qualities (although I *can* accept satan totally evil characters, but I don't think their Evil Minions need be ugly or totally evil)

-Vices *always* protrayed as virtues

And I'll go in with Jenni with the children characters being too easy to handle and too smart and so on... and with the fuzzy best friend animals who love angsty protag no matter what stupid thing they do (which is, of course, not stupid in the end).

But I think, compared to a lot of the things listed above, mine are pretty general, and I've only put down... one or two books in my entire life because I could not bear to finish.

*pauses*

*glances around*

Anyway, yeah. I can be talked into reading a lot of that stuff. I'm a big pushover.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Again, I think the problem is that I don't believe in Ancient Evil as opposed to Modern Evil. I don't think there is an evil in the human race that has disappeared from the earth for generations. I think it sticks around, generally, in one form or another.

[raecarson.livejournal.com]

Any. Arthurian. Fantasy.

Time travel (usu. to Medieval Scotland) romance.

Private investigators of the paranormal persuasion.

Mysterious, misunderstood women who are *gasp* witches.

All of these have worked for me at some time or another, but like you said, the author must earn the right to use them.

[ktempest.livejournal.com]

is "Time travel (usu. to Medieval Scotland) romance" done a lot? Oops. I had a student who was going to write that very book. I guess I should warn her.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

Target audience shrinking. Target audience shrinking

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ::giggles::

I swear, the smut makes up for the writer character and the apostrophes.


And my main turn-off --

Puppy/kitten crushing bad guys - the ones who do it at the beginning of the book so you'll know the guy is teh evul, and because the writer knows he hasn't a chance of making you care enough about a random red-shirt that fast.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

A lot of mine have already been covered, but what irritates me massively is when a novel has women characters who are set up to be strong interesting characters in some way, but don't actually Do Anything, except be side-kicky to male hero, in terms of agency within the plot. Bah. I'm also slightly allergic to Belles Dames Sans Merci type muse figures (seen from the outside - from within could be intriguing - ?feel there is at least one Tanith Lee that might count here), but this is something I might possibly get to in my deferred recent-ish reading post. And I gave up on the Hoyt because of the blahness of the style.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Celts. Or Celtic-ish characters and/or society. It Wasn't Like That, Dammit.

Just about anything falling under the general heading "contemporary literature," including (though not especially) Chick Lit. It Isn't Like That, Dammit. (For some people and social circles it may be, but not on a wide enough scale to deserve a description as "an X description of modern Y life." Along the same lines, Jeff Foxworthy had a good point about how his while-ago sitcom ran into network problems as being "too regional," yet comfortable New York professionals are somehow "universal.")

Plucky Southern women. Widows require double-strength earning.

Alien races who are All One Religion or All One Political Persuasion.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I would think that alien races who speak all one language would have come ahead even of the other two on your list. Though I agree with both.

We don't actually have a problem with too many plucky Northern women in fiction. It's very sad. Maybe it's because we're more stoical than plucky.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Oooh, forgot one. This one pertains to TV, too.

Novels that depend on a particular hook from real life that are so poorly researched as to present you with inconsistencies that would be obvious to anyone who has watched five minutes of the Learning Channel or read the most basic intro book on the subject.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The worst part about this? Is that sometimes the book is right and the Learning Channel and the intro book are wrong. But you can't just charge in with that; you have to assume your reader has been misinformed and go from there. It's very sad. I try not to get ideas that require that, lest I go entirely mad.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

I don't think I can generate a list. My plot-point and character buttons are all luke-warm; I just don't like things to be badly (or unengagingly) done.

People doing sloppy research irks me. I may be the only person on earth who dislikes The Doomsday Book, but frankly, the "big revelations" about how life really was that the main character has when she travels back in time aren't really big revelations if you've ever read any non-idiotic history books. The whole book would have worked for me if they hadn't been "big revelations." (sigh)

But you usually don't find out about the sloppy until half-way through the book, anyway.

[i-ate-my-crusts.livejournal.com]

I may be the only person on earth who dislikes The Doomsday Book

You're not alone. And big, fat, furry, ditto on the "big revelations".

Automatic Dislike

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Conversations that only make sense if you're reading them, not if you're speaking them. For example:
"Eight."
"Ate?"
"No, eight."
"Oh, gotcha."

When the hero has some mystical power that nobody (including him) knew about and that he can't control, and swoops in and saves his ass at the very end. Rather than, you know, the hero saving his own ass.

Harry Potter.

Stories that don't end when they're over.

Characters that are only important because It's Their Destiny. Or people who have a destiny, for that matter, can go take a flying leap for all I care.

And the gawky teenager who takes their glasses off, and is suddenly beautiful (more prevalent in TV than books).

Re: Automatic Dislike

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

rilina was talking about the gawky teenager taking her glasses off and suddenly being beautiful in books, too, on her journal a few days ago. There's an exchange in "Enigma" (which you should totally see if you haven't) where one of the characters says, "You know, Miss Wallace, without your glasses, you don't look half bad!" And she replies, "Without my glasses, nor do you."

I think one of the things that frustrates me more about this is that some people really look much better with glasses. Our friend Mike from high school, for example: really, really better with glasses than without.

On the other hand, I can see where this fallacy comes from, because many people (Mandy Fritz, for example) get contacts or more flattering glasses around the time they're coming out of their awkward phase otherwise, so "better looking" and "lack of glasses" aren't entirely independent variables.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

* Messiah-esque plots. (Though one that totally screws with the assumptions is Holly Lisle's Secret Texts trilogy.)
* Using cutesy first names for men that are straight out of soap operas- yeah, who REALLY names their kid Cain or Judas or Devil?
* Tesla is a huge one for me. (The Prestige gets a bye from me on that, but I don't think anything else does. And Spider Robinson should have gotten spanked for what he did.)
* Werewolves. I'm good with Kelley Armstrong, but most other werewolf stuff (LKH, ahem) makes me wince. Ugh.
* Descriptions on the back cover in which I cannot for the life of me figure out what the book is about because it's filled with strange words and has very little (if anything) in common with our language and/or world. If I can't figure out what it's about, I'm not gonna buy it, people.
* Really bad biology that goes way beyond what's plausible, even if you factor magic into the mix. (Those books by Lisanne Norman, with the telepathic cat species that can magically breed with humans...YEAH FUCKING RIGHT.)

[i-ate-my-crusts.livejournal.com]

Oh, pick me.

An author has to earn the right to use:

Hitler
Trolls
Vampires
Dragons
Gnomes/goblins
Prehistoric contraceptives
Revenge/vengeance as a major theme
Plague
Poetry

Nothing will save book-meet-wall for an author who uses:

A character that all the other characters (and the author!) love, despite lack of desirable personality traits or actions.

Characters that change personality and/or typical responses, without major life-changing event. I think this one gets me the most - a person, in real life, responds to things based on experience and persnality (among other things). Having characters whose responses don't mesh from one situation to another, or don't mesh with their experience, flings me out of a story so fast I get whiplash AND makes me snort with derision and disbelief. Character consistency is your friend.

Sex that doesn't further the story.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Prehistoric contraceptives. Oh yes, yes. For true. Also, perfectly functioning rhythm method especially without things like basal thermometers. The human body is just not that mathematically precise.