Fiction cliches you hate

[SPBInDisguise]

I read mostly crime and thriller.
Can't bear books that take the first hundred pages to describe the landscape. Thick frost, frozen lake, snowy trees, onto the action please.
Detectives that drink lots of coffee and work all night but somehow seem to actually work very little

[Terpsichore]

Have been reading these with great amusement, though haven't managed the whole thread. I'm sure someone must have mentioned the mania for writing in the present tense, which drives me insane - I hate, hate, hate it.
Actually Jane Green is a major offender, and I'm sure other people copy her because they think she's so successful, thus perpetuating the whole thing.

But my other hate is crime novels that open with a supposedly 'creepy' opening section narrated by the villain....usually in italics and full of meaningful spaces. E.g.

I watch her. She is unaware of my presence, and I exult as I stand, unseen, in the shadows.

Today is the day she will......die

Then it usually cuts to Chapter 1 and gritty banter in a police station somewhere, with a downtrodden 'tec chain-smoking and eating bacon sandwiches.

Oh FFS. Give us a break.

[EllieCook]

I can't stand it when two characters hate each other at first and then after a series of misunderstandings bla bla, it ends in a big, passionate love affair. If he (or she) is an arrogant jerk, that ought to tell you all you need to know. We women do more damage to ourselves by buying into that stuff....

[Jux]

Thank goodness the only chick lit I read is the stuff quoted or parodied on here! LaQueen, you could make a living - if it didn't make you ill!

I hate those conversations which take place merely to let the reader know what's going on, what the background is etc. I know it was said upthread, but it is such lazy, crap writing. Good writers manage to do it properly so you barely notice what they are doing. The current batch of editors are, imo, absolutely appalling and almost as bad as most of the writers on sale.

[StairsInTheNight]

That made me feel a bit rancid. But thanks.

Jane Green... I'm sure she did a transforming one where the heroine lost half her bodyweight in about 3 months, and was wicked toned too, and went off to America to meet an utter arse and did the gym and stuff. There was a buttery yellow suede skirt involved too IIRC. It was dreadful shite.

[StairsInTheNight]

I like this, a sort of chick lit axis of evil. The book would get more and more twee, there would be more descriptions of clothes, more clumsy heroines, angst over fuck all and misunderstanding and knowing kids until BOOM it just explodes into a mass of pink feathers and you would NEVER get to read again as a punishment from god.

[barbarianoftheuniverse]

I hate all these + the Cute Kid Subplot (especially if it becomes Meaningful). Not Scout in To Kill a MB. Those little ducks who innocently remark Why Don't You Snuggle Aunty GreyPants you know she called her teddy Big Bear after you?
I particularly loathed that little boy in Love Actually. Him with the drumkit and the notices on his bedroom door. If ever a child needed an XBox.

[lainiekazan]

Agree, RosyRoo. You know that these crap writers have only had their book considered because they have mates in the industry.

Agree too about the "local yokels". The bloke the girl meets back in their home town (why is it always somewhere quaint, too, and not Swindon?) may be a mechanic/tree surgeon/boat builder - but really he's a disillusioned human rights lawyer or surgeon erroneously blamed for a botched operation. Girls can't make a match for life with a thicko can they?

And may I suggest "the letter". How many times has the average person discovered a letter hidden inside a book containing a buried secret? Anyone?

[Thewhingingdefective]

Just about every cliched convention of any genre annoys me, but mainly detectives living alone in an apartment with an empty fridge, a cat and a coffee pot.

[RosyRoo]

There is an overwhelming tendency for the main protagonist to be either a writer or to work in publishing. Have authors got so little imagination that they cannot imagine a life outside of the very narrow world they operate in. Also, everyone seems to have loads of spare cash, even if they say they don't. They never seem to consider the cost before catching the train to Devon, or taking a taxi across town for an urgent romantic tryst.

[Stropzilla]

Over describing something. I don't care what everyone in the room is wearing or how their hair is styled. Or the feel, weight, colour and entire history of the gun being used taking 2 pages to talk about.

Repetitive use of phrases. I'm looking at Terry Goodkinds Sword of Truth series. Being reminded every page of Richards "raptor gaze" made DH and I very stabby.

[hackmum]

What a great thread. Haven't read it all, so apologies if some of these have been mentioned, but in crime fiction (this applies to both tv and books), there are certain things that always give the game away, e.g. if it begins with "and the body was never found", you know that the person is still alive. If there are identical twins, it was the other twin who was murdered/is the murderer, not the one you think. If a character is mentioned early on but appears to have no obvious role in the plot, then later on they will turn out to be really significant, ie they will be the murderer or lead to the murderer.

[sieglinde]

and come to think of it, he shouldn't kiss her lips, unless he is her blood relative. Mouths kiss, not lips.

[sieglinde]

Or 'he crushed her to him'. GBH, I think. Ouch.

Or kisses that taste of heaven, or some other such nonexistent substance.

[NicknameTaken]

Mardy, that reminds me of my first kiss, which featured the memorable words "Why don't you spit out that gum?"

Have never been able to chew banana-flavoured bubble gum since.

[MardyArsedMidlander]

Any romantic novel where he 'crushes his lips to her'- isn't that bloody uncomfortable? What if you are half way through chewing a sandwich?

[NicknameTaken]

Any description of a dream. Not even the "then he woke up and found the entire plot to date was a dream" type, but any description of a dream whatsoever. It's boring when someone tells you in real life, and it's boring in a novel.

I will grudgingly accept "He woke, heart still pounding from nightmares that hovered just beyond his recall" but keep them beyond recall. Please, please, keep them beyond recall.

[sieglinde]

Stephanie, total agreement about child abuse as the only motivator for anything at all. So so done to death.

Children's books about the Holocaust where the POV child doesn't realise what's going on in the nearby camp. Timeslip novels where the child POV character doesn't realise it's the nineteenth century for many chapters despite the steam trains and grime.

Dark fayries or fays or feyries or fairys? FFS.

Corygal, what books are you thinking of re a scholarship?

[Trills]

You don't need a scholarship to go to Oxford - it costs just the same as any other university (which is "no money up front").

[Corygal]

When the worthy and poor heroine escapes her meagre circs through a scholarship to Oxford.

FGS - what about the worthy people who aren't the next Nobel/Booker candidates? And the only people I know who got one had rich parents.

[StephaniePowers]

Any of the following:

• child abuse, only revealed for what it is in the last 1/6th of the novel.
  
• alcoholic hero who has no bother at all in getting it up whenever he wants to, and despite years of alcohol abuse, is desperately attractive to a variety of women who could naturally do ten times better without even trying.
  
• 'getting away from it all' usually some sort of man trouble, only to instantly take up with the handsome local yokel. IME handsome local yokels always have 13-yr-old girlfriends and a warning that they'll be done next time for statutory rape, that never appears in such novels.