good and bad writing techniques

[watervole]

The replies and comments to my poll about scientific accuracy in science fiction http://www.livejournal.com/users/watervole/139771.html#cutid1 were extrememly interesting. (If you haven't already filled in that one, I'm still reading replies to it - I'm tempted to do another poll focusing more on sociological and biological factors.).

Please could you try this one on writing techniques and expand on your replies in the comments. What writing habits annoy you the most in stories you read? What will make you put down a book before finishing the first page? What makes you hit the back button when reading fiction on the web?

[Poll #652911]

Comments

[kerravonsen]

POV: well, of course it depends. Sometimes it can work with an omniscience author who dips into the heads of the characters, but I do prefer a tight POV, because it gets you closer to the characters. I'm not one of these people who hates I-stories, though it does get annoying if you have more than two POV characters.

Said-phobia: it doesn't drive me up the wall, but it is better to use non-said words when they're needed... so I guess I'm happier with things like "mumbled", because it tells you how they spoke, rather than things like "expostulated, explained" or even "said sadly" because it's better if their words and expression shows you what they're feeling, rather than being told.

Accents: speech patterns can be interesting -- just consider Yoda! But I don't want to have to sit there and puzzle out what the person is saying, so I don't like the funny spellings.

Backgrounds: well, I guess I'm between #1 and #2 even though I answered #1... I certainly hate info-dumps, they're really annoying. They don't happen in real life, they don't happen in movies, so why do I have to put up with them in prose? There's one exception, though, and that's if you have a good narrator-voice, someone who is "telling the story", if you can have someone's life-story summarized in a very witty way, then the author has brought me along with them. But 99% of the time, that doesn't happen.

Spelling and grammar: I probably get most irritated by spellchecker errors, because often enough, I'm thrown out of the story as I try to puzzle out what the author actually meant, and it sends me the message that the author doesn't care, because they couldn't be bothered to give the story a once-over to see whether it makes sense (or get an editor/beta-reader to do so). Things like "your" vs "you're" are irritating in the same way.