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

Oh and 'collective' children, who are no more than props for the adult characters' tangled lovelives - so they have to hop out from between the sticky sheets and go and collect 'the children', or when the knock comes at the door from the plod/bailiff/axe murderer they have to make 'the children' hide...

Authors who feel the need to drop pointless and senseless "twists" into their books, because their books are renowned for having twists.

Jodi Picoult and Melissa Hill in particular.

Bad research. Very specifically Anita Shreve in "The Pilot's Wife." : "The world exclusive broke the next day in "The Belfast Telegraph""

Yes, that's the type of paper the "Belfast Telegraph" is. It breaks world exclusives

I like crime fiction but cannot bear the mini, one-page chapters in italics that are supposed to be from the psycho's POV. So unbelievably clichéd.

His breathing grew shallow as he peered through the window at the young, slim woman undressing. She would be his finest prize. What would her insides look like?

Booooooring!

Re anita shreve, far less annnoying than that writing in the present tense thing she does. dreadful. couldn't read another.

I came to the limits of my patience with her a year ago and donated all the books I had of hers to the charity shop. I think she could have produced a few very good books rather than a dozen increasingly irritating ones.

Its very annoying when a writer's later books turn you off ever rereading their earlier ones (i.e. Jodi Picoult).

Oh bugger it's in Chat!

We should do something about that.

Heleeeeeeeeen? Oliviiaaaaaaaaa? Someoooooooooooone?

I watched Life of Pi last night.

At the very end we see his wife and children, and there is no suggestion whatsoever that he went back to India to find the girl that he had a crush on when he was 15. Which is good, because the trope of "first true love" is bollocks.

I don't like heroines 'padding' along hallways and corridors....why can't they just walk?

It surprises me that so many people go to creepy remote houses/villages/islands to get over or get through a terrible event in their life. Their child has gone missing/been murdered/kidnapped etc so they leave their semi in Watford and rent a derelict former orphanage (usually haunted) halfway up a mountain to get their heads round it all? So if the police/social workers/police support person/family/friends needs to pop over and fill them in/check something out or see how their managing, they have to be airlifted in (usually in the middle of the worst flood since records began).

Thanks to the very lovely Rowan we are now in Adult Fiction and will not be deleted (unless this thread takes a turn in a very strange direction!)

Yes, the retreat to an isolated cottage by the sea. In winter.

YAY to thread saving. Well done Trills.

Pretty much all chicklit could be produced by a Random Chicklit Generator TM.

Group of women meet a bookclub/diet club/evening class. A chapter each with miserable backstory leading up to unsatisfactory present. They laugh, they cry, they given each other insights. 260 pages later they are thinner (an occasional character will have been previously anorexic but now looks healthier and fleshed out), with better jobs, and happily shacked up with the perfect new partner. Oh, the pointlessness.

You missed out the bit where woman goes to a random remote place in order to fall in love with a tall dark handsome farmer/artist/writer who also lives in remote place with unsatisfactory family/by self broodingly/ with older insightful friend. Although at first the sparks will fly their dogs will soon bring them together.

Main characters are often writers who go off into remote places to focus on their book - as if that wouldn't drive them stir-crazy. I guess this is because the actual writer realises that anyone with a job where you have to actually go there every day won't have time for the adventures that they have planned.

Women whose boyfriends cheat on/dump them, then they take up some improbable career (setting up organic markets/listed building restoration/boat building) because it's what they've always wanted to do and ex has been holding them back.

Yes, Katie Fforde, I'm looking at you!

Cliche pet hates include red soles of louboutin's flashing as she walked, perfectly manicured fingernails being tapped on the table, and tossing her long blond subtly/expensively highlighted hair.

Describing seamen as "His warm liquid"

that it won't be deleted.
But at what you're all reading. I don't recognise much of this except the protracted Scandinavian weather as character/ pathetic fallacy and big reveal of child sexual abuse
I hate makeover scenes in movies.

Any book where the hero is "moody" and controlling but the heroine ends up with him anyway.
I want to shout "Red Flag, Red Flag, don't you read the Mumsnet Relationships section?"