 Drama: October 15, 2014 Issue [#6594] |
  Drama
This week: Pet Peeves in Fiction Edited by: Joy  
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Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about pointless and stale elements in fiction writing that readers may not enjoy.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Do you have any pet peeves that bother you while reading a novel or a story? I sometimes feel like stopping my reading when I come across an annoying and overused story element. These irksome elements are usually clichés.
Clichés do not inflict themselves only as words and phrases. They can also infect storytelling practices. What miffs most editors, in general, are: Lame beginnings, too much detail or backstory, stereotyped characters, hackneyed plots or fiction without a plot. Aside from those, what I mean by clichés is the plot points and elements that have become trite and boring, as they point to their writer’s laziness or inexperience.
Although each editor has his own set of cliché elements in plots as pet peeves, what most editors agree upon are the following story clichés:
• A character describing oneself while looking at a mirror: Only a narcissist would keep noticing her face, as if for the first time, as in “She approved the way she looked, her jade-green eyes, full red lips, and turned up nose.” People in general, especially adults, already know what they look like.
• Using dreams too often: Readers like to read what is actually happening in the story, not necessarily what is happening inside a dreamer’s mind in a warped fashion, unless the story is science fiction and is about dreams, as in the movie Inception. Rule of thumb is not to use more than one to three dreams per novel after the beginning.
• Throughout the story only one character, protagonist or the antagonist, acting smart or devious and seeing through the gist of things while the other characters are extremely gullible: It is all right to use one character as the naïve one for variety, but if the writer makes everyone else but the main character clueless, the story will not sound true.
• Using or describing any scientific or medical procedure without enough knowledge or research: Let us not forget that most people have some connection to the medical field and may know a thing or two about the scientific processes. Not enough research will cause the reader to doubt the truth in the story and the believability of the writer’s words.
• Having people or criminals confess to things too easily or by a sudden whip of guilty conscience: Unless they have an ulterior motive, most criminals may not confess easily. In the same vein, a sudden remorse in a hardened criminal without a good reason means the writer took the easy way out.
• Ending the story abruptly with no reason and without tying all or most of the loose ends: This may mean the writer got tired of writing or didn’t care what happened to his story anymore.
In addition to these, I have a couple of pet peeves, also. One of them is too many inside jokes or references to little known material that only the author and a small section of people are privy to, such as using quotes from a new movie like the French film, Horseman on the Roof. The other is describing sex explicitly for titillation to the degree of turning a serious story into pornography.
Yet, what gets to me the most are the stories written in a series where each book is not a full story. I have read novels that cut the main storyline in the middle or right at its climax with the note that the solution or the end will be revealed in the next book. This is considered deception rather than being a bookselling practice. Each book in a series needs to be a story on its own. The second book may take a secondary character and continue as another story, which is just fine, but the writer’s breaking the main plot in the middle and ending the book but not the story is my biggest pet-peeve.
What are your pet peeves where fiction is concerned? Do you try to omit those in your writing as well as some of the above?
Have a great fall season and enjoy Halloween. Until next time...
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 Enjoy!
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 This Issue's Tip: If the middle of your novel or story is turning overweight and taking away from the ending, omit or absorb a subplot, combine or cut characters, or trim or delete duller scenes.
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Feedback for "Spinning Tales with Myths and Legends"
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jim1184 
Fun Newsletter , on a topic I really enjoy. Running your characters through a mythological background allows you a lot of flexibility. I am basing my characters in welsh mythology and the Celtic otherworld. One persons Mythology could be another persons religion or history.
Thank you!
That is great. I like reading work by Welsh and Celtic authors, mostly in realistic or literary fiction, but they, too, have supernatural elements and myths in them sometimes.
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BIG BAD WOLF Feeling Thankful 
Submitted: "Non-Humans R Us Newsletters"
There is a lot out there.
Yes, I think so, too.
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Quick-Quill 
There is a moral to all stories. Its called Theme which is sometimes mixed up with Dramatic Premise. What I've learned is we can look at all our favorite stories and see the moral. We then can apply that to our stories.
I like stories with a moral, too, but sometimes, it is so hidden, you have to imagine it.
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