For me, shitty style / lazy writing make me put a book down immediately. I was raised on the worship of style you find in writers like Flaubert or Nabokov (who also happened to have deplorable political views) and I can’t shake it.
Others commented here recently that making every female character in a story into a sex object is a bad thing.
What are some reasons you’ll put a book down after you’ve spent at least a little time giving it a try?
The internet has ruined my attention span and I can only finish a book that I’m nearly addicted to
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: He straightened his tie. He had lost, but in a romantic way, which meant that he had won. “I’m going to do a pushup,” he announced to his tie. His tie respected him for it, and secretly wished that it could have sex with him.
:lt-dbyf-dubois:
There’s a lot of incest too. Then also I don’t know if it’s a Spanish thing because I’m maybe not even an intermediate but when be writes “mujer” it’s translated into English as “wife” even though I think “mujer” just means woman?
The site you posted seems to be making fun of Cormac McCarthy. He writes muscular prose which means long sentences connected by like twenty ands.
mujer means woman but if you put a possesive before it means wife example
su mujer his wife
mi mujer my wife
tu mujer your wife
la mujer the womanyeah it's pretty common to refer to wife as mujer or mi mujer
Hispanic culture is pretty chauvinistic lol (but don't let the right wingers know that, unless they're Franco stans already)
Power fantasies, i hate them, i feel like the story is inevitably going to be boring since esentially there is no conflict, alas i encounter them a lot since i read a lot of fanficition.
Also harems, its probably theoreticaly possible that this kind of relationship would be handled well in the story but i refuse to read them on principle
I have only read a couple of light novels, my experience with these tropes mainly comes from reading manga or fanfiction.
The slanted power dynamic thing does explain why i hate harems as when i read romance novels i avoid ones with uneven power dynamics like for example one of the main characters being a billionaire.
There's an entire subgenre of cheap awful romance books that are about stuff like Navy SEAL werewolf billionaire romantic partners.
Oh no I died and woke up in a fantasy world where my mediocrity actually makes me the winningest winner and all these neotenic fangirls are fighting over my attention! Also any sociopolitical hangups I have are indulged here, so maybe I'll get a false rape accusation and one day the rape accuser will be raped to death while a crowd cheers on her comeuppance! :so-true:
I don't often just put down a novel and give up reading it. But last time I did it was the inherently sexist, gender-essentialist nature of the magic system baked into the entire setting that did it for me.
The Eye of the World. For the life of me I will never understand why Wheel of Time is so popular with other people who like fantasy novels.
I couldn't stand the first book either and knew it was what you were referring to. I couldn't get into it at all and only later did I read up on the gender-based magic system.
One second, I'm gonna have to cross my arms under my breasts and tug on my ponytail to indicate that I am upset.
Okay, got that out of the way, although somehow one of my arms has become three feet long and completely bendy in order to accomplish it.
Had Robert Jordan just never met a woman? It's painfully bad.
As it should be, because it's really good.
goes back to muttering about Ilyena
At least it isn't Terry Goodkind's Ayn-Rand-With-Swords fascist shit.
If some treats defender on Hexbear stood up and unironically defended that, I'd transcend to a new level of Jokerfication. :joker-che:
no that's cool specifically because it's such hilarious libertarian garbage
It's not fun to laugh at a garbage fire when people have to breathe in the fumes.
I went to school alongside lots of Terry Goodkind fans. Without exception all of them already were, or became, cryptofash Randroids and some are also now cops or even hold public office. That's not hilarious to me. :desolate:
Understandable. The weird gender stuff prevented me from getting into it at all. That and the guy who introduced me to it ended up being a vaguely tradfash weirdo with plenty of his own gender brainworms.
Sounds like just about every East Asian MMORPG. Some are so absurd that they have exceptions that serve their creepy fanbase, like "the only race that can be any class is the one that looks like 9 year olds with visible underwear."
If your book is a surface-level dive into the seedy underbelly of the American suburban middle-class family, I am not interested in your book. (See: Jonathan Franzen, Celeste Ng, John Irving)
My college years as an English major were mostly that. The professors looooooved that. The gold standard for a good story was that it listed every name brand visible around the kitchen counter while :grillman: smokes very specific cigarettes and cusses a lot and nothing happens.
write what you know is why there are so many books about english professors considering having an affair
This is the only version of that I will accept.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/other/15
My worst beta reader said I needed to do exactly that, and further, said "a shower scene with details is inevitable."
The main character was a half-starved refugee girl.
Just to spite him I did have a shower scene, one that doesn't describe anything about the character's body except the layers of toxic grime finally falling away before hurrying out and almost choking with enthusiasm on the first "real" meal she could remember.
If I'm having a shower, that's exactly what I'd be focusing on too
old-timey prose. especially 18th century, fucking kills my brain to read, even when im interested in the topic/plot, whatever
Dangerous Liasons is a interesting story and good movie but reading the book... HELLISH
Robespierre, awesome dude, great quotes, but unedited? Nonononono
if their sentence has more than two semicolons they need to slow the fuck down
You should open up Mason & Dixon next time you’re in a library or bookstore. The dedication to the bit is just astounding
im the kind of sicko who might extremely dig that. as much as i hate the genuine article i've wrote more than one enlightenment style parody essays :agony-soviet:
Not gonna differentiate between amateur writing and professional writing here, since I tear through hundreds of pages of fiction a week when I have free time, which makes remembering what something is from a pain. It also means I read a lot of crap. Generally, I put something down for one of the following reasons:
- Obnoxious reactionary politics. Someone starts pushing fash shit, I put the book down. Sadly, more common than I'd like.
- Major grammatical shortcomings. Not a typo or two, those are fine. Consistent poor use of punctuation, tenses, or anything that consistently distracts me from actually reading.
- Grinding misery. I can deal with hard things happen to a character, but if the whole story is just misery after misery, I'm not gonna put up with it forever. Example: Name of the Wind. Just, constant grinding misery and it almost always the MC's fault in the microcosm. It's a fine introduction to why poverty is self-reinforcing (everything that can fuck you over will fuck you over, and all of your available decisions are variations on bad ones), but it is also miserable to read.
- Certain kinds of being too real. I struggle to read some trans-centering literature explicitly because it either makes me feel incredibly dysphoric or because it just re-triggers my own sore points. This can be hard to predict ahead of time with a text. I experience this most often in the context of fanfiction.
- Tension without release. One of the trends I see in fanfiction over 200k words is a tendency to not be able to allow pressure off of the story for a little while before bringing it back. Arcs are either not fully resolved, leaving no downtime to the story or the author can't help but continue escalating. This is a bit like grinding misery, but not the same. I find it exhausting. If I wanted to deal with an unending grind where things never get better, I'd go outside.
"Tension without release. One of the trends I see in fanfiction over 200k words is a tendency to not be able to allow pressure off of the story for a little while before bringing it back. Arcs are either not fully resolved, leaving no downtime to the story or the author can’t help but continue escalating. This is a bit like grinding misery, but not the same. I find it exhausting. If I wanted to deal with an unending grind where things never get better, I’d go outside."
This one is why I gave up entirely on anything related to Halo a number of years ago. Maybe things changed, but I doubt it, and I can't help but assume the series is perpetually locked in a series of unresolved cliffhangers and side stories where nothing changes except Cortana gets more and more fanservicey.
I'm very particular about description. If they use racist tropes like food analogies or only focus on describing non-white people, I'm going to notice.
I also hate it when authors use shorthand. Don't just call it a starship and then leave it at that.
Oy vey. I thought you meant something like, hinting that someone is italian because they like pizza.
"Her skin was a pale and glistening with sweat, like some fresh mozzarella melting on a pizza."
Any detective novel written by a comedian or politician who thinks they're funny. I only made this mistake once in reading some dross Hugh Laurie wrote. They all want to be P.G. Wodehouse but seem to forget that Wodehouse is humor strictly for the worst sort of self-sucking nerd, and isn't actually that funny at all if you were born after 1970 or unless you like a very specific kind of camp.
These are things I mostly see in fanfiction and their prevalence is a large part of why I rarely read fanfic anymore, but:
- Poorly understood and badly applied historical/scientific concepts, especially evopsych
- Characters acting as blatant strawmen for people/positions the author doesn't like
- Protagonists who effortlessly pulverize all challenges laid before them
- When the story enters the author's magical realm
- Using atrocities like rape and slavery in a tone-deaf and shallow manner for cheap shock value
" Poorly understood and badly applied historical/scientific concepts, especially evopsych Characters acting as blatant strawmen for people/positions the author doesn’t like Protagonists who effortlessly pulverize all challenges laid before them When the story enters the author’s magical realm Using atrocities like rape and slavery in a tone-deaf and shallow manner for cheap shock value "
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality gets a bingo!
So many of my friends at the sci-fi club liked that back in the day. smh
I maintian hp:mor is good. The slaver and rape stuff was from the original. It is otherswise a quest to overthrow the bourgeois and give everyone universal healthcare.
I disagree but I'd rather not get into it. I'll just summarize that if the intention and the prevailing message was really about that, then Peter Thiel wouldn't be throwing millions at Big Yud for writing it and there wouldn't be the billionaire worshipping LessWrong cult in its present form that gets its doctrines and jargon from HPMOR, all under the leadership of Big Yud himself.
You are correct in both that it is at this point tedious to examine, and that isn't what yud ment to write. It is entirely luck and his lack of foresight that allowed thst work to be any good at all. If he possed the skill to write what he wanted it would have been garbage. I think he still has me blocked on Facebook for calling hpjev a maoist
If that really is the wrong interpretation of HPMOR, Big Yud doesn't seem too interested in correcting the cult that follows him entirely based upon a billionaire bootlicking paperclip maximizing "rationalist" perspective of that fanfiction that has also made him quite rich.
I will die on the hill that he is a weiner and objectively wrong about his own work. It accidentally has good stuff in it because he copied from better writers and didn't file the serial numbers off.
All the miri stuff is seperate and painfully childish. Just straight brainworms and sophistry As he blocked me from the sub-reddit for reminding him. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer.
He's a fine example of the folly of "autodidacts." He isn't particularly good at anything except promoting his own brand and steering his own cult with a lot of billionaire backing because he kisses that much ass. He wrote very bad poetry about how it's too bad that the masses won't learn to code, but he fucking doesn't know how to code either.
I have a very specific and parasocial beef with the guy. Probably the biggest part of my being able to imagine a better world and become a filthy commie was through rationalism. I tried to get a less wrong meetup going, emailed him a bit, visited other groups. It was what allowed me to imagine a better world was possible after obama broke my faith in the dnc. It was the specific failure of that group to be less wrong that primed me for chapo and bernie. I still have specific enmity for them starting a fucking cult dedicated to logic and consistently being irrationally credulous fools.
I can relate. I don't want to doxx myself any further than I already have, but I was big into the extropian then futurology convention circuits from the late 90s all the way into the late 2000s when just about every gathering became bought and owned by billionaire oligarchs and started having Department of Defense guys showing off their surveillance and killing machines, too. There was even a phantasmagoric presentation where someone was getting a crude implant stuck in them with an audience watching, blood and all. The cult vibes were too much and I left forever. It gave me great ideas for my book trilogy, though.
He's one of those "too smart for school" types, which I used to think I was back in high school. Then I went to college and had to overcome serious academic challenges for the first time, and I realized just how limited that knowledge was. He dropped out of high school and never went to college, so he never had that sort of humbling experience. Instead he, as you say, gets his ego inflated by billionaires because he tells them what they want to hear.
The slaver and rape stuff was from the original.
This definitely wasn't in the original:
CW: Rape, racism
Draco snarled. "She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I'm old enough I'm going to rape her."
There had been ten thousand societies over the history of the world where this conversation could have taken place. Even in Muggle-land it was probably still happening, somewhere in Saudi Arabia or the darkness of the Congo. It happened in every place and time that didn’t descend directly from the Enlightenment.
As soon as an otherwise-promising story introduces the feeemale hottie who is defined by whatever her father did, and her scientific credientials/magical prowess immediately spill out of her head the moment she sees DudeBro McManPain the Ego Insert, I put the novel down.
That's happened a distressing number of times.
If I wanted that trash I'd watch SyFy in-house movies.
Also, if there's prominent smirking, cold piercing stares, or soft chuckles, I'm going to get allergic reactions.
