Annoying Literary Cliches

[wukter]

I hate "The Somethings Daughter/Wife".
It's never The Insurance Claims Processor's Wife or The Carpet Fitter's Daughter.

Also hate feisty heroines.
Why can't they be mild mannered and polite, and yet have an interesting life.

Well. That's off my chest anyway.

In Tom Clancy/Dan Brown-type action nonsense, the bad guys never 'say' something, they always 'snap'.

And Severus Snape always 'silkily' says something.

How does that work then?

Lunatic you're mistaken on your last point. In ALL of the novels/biographies that have been turned into films in which Joaquin Phoenix has starred the characters have had a repaired hare lip (and looked damned sexy too!)

Ahhahahahaha - great chick lit cliches here.

Yes, one shag gets you pregnant in chick lit, every time.

I hate when detective novelists realize their audience is primarily lonely older women yearning to nurture a broken man and make hime all better because they know his true worth even though he's a bastard on the outside- and then proceed to cater to it.

Have to agree on the female detectives. (Actually, Val McDermid's detectives are all perfectly well-balanced.) All the real women I know who went into the police are intelligent, cheerful people who like using their skills to make the world a better place. None of them are noticeably damaged.

Re Severus Snape, Stephen Fry had a go at Rowling for having a character "hiss" a sentence with no S's - you don't necessarily notice when you're reading it, but it becomes very obvious if you have to narrate it for the talking book. He had words, and she never did it again.

I would also defend Bridget Jones (the book). I saw the film first and all the fuss over how appallingly fat she was, and only then read the books and realised that her peak weight was 9 1/2 stone.

bobbiewickham - the Guernsey literary potato peel pie society book is a really good read - unlike the Ukrainian tractor one, which really isn't. The former is about the Nazi occupation of Guernsey, not chicklitty at all, IMO.

I do hate and loathe Sophie Kinsella's shopaholic. The dozy tart in it has my palm itching to slap her for her indolent, lying, spendthrift ways - I see no humour in her at all.

Re. the 'unprepared for casual sex scenario' - whatabout Bridget Jones and the Scary Pants? That always had me in stitches.

My normal 'weeding out' mechanism for a book is whether or not it is described as "witty" - to me, that indicates that the author has attempted but failed significantly to inject humour into their tome and it's rarely worth trying to read.

And my least favourite cliché is "she slicked on a layer of lipstick" - AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!
Oh and the constant references to glugging Chardonnay/Chablis/Pinot - who gives a flying fuck what type of wine it is?
Ditto the shoes - not bovvered!

Glitterkitty please clarify re: Perdita's toffee apple head?

I am a Jilly Cooper addict despite the cliches, appalling sentence structure and often total bizarreness (anyone from the Tack Room want to discuss sharkskin breeches?) but don't remember that..?

Have read a few romance novels in my time... and there's always a scene in which the heroine rather unbelieveably stands stark naked in front of a mirror and takes stock of her bits as if she'd never seen them before. Lots of stuff about flat stomachs and womanly hips and small but pert bosoms.

Also whenever the heroine goes to have dinner she always has salad and the hero always has something manly like steak - and they are always going on about them 'taking a bite' of something, never eating it.

maktaitai I totally know what you mean - it's grannylit, isn't it - I am always a bit freaked out by the storyline in those kind of books where the selfish meddlesome parents die suddenly so offspring have to live with lovely, generous and oh-so-wise grandparents. I think I caught MIL reading one of those once

Have we mentioned Freya North? I bet we have.

I was in France with no book to read at all apart from a Freya North and I had to give up. It was making me feel ill.

Oh yes, the gratuitous nude auto-perving - very strange. Reaches its apogee in the first scene of Lace (that's "These are the most famous breasts in the world, thought Lilly as she soaped them" for those of you who were not teenagers in the 1980's)

I thought the Guernsey Literary Potato Peel blah blah was a joke

It sounds a total piss-take, doesn't it? But it is real.

Oh gawd, Lace! All that rape! Dreadful bloody book.

Really - I was impressed with BobbieWickham's parodying skills. Then saw it on the Waterstone's website and hooted. What a silly title - even if the book's good!

By the way, I loved Lace. Definitely of its era, but I was a teenager in the 80s, you see.

Lilly's breasts! oh yes! It was a new idea to me that anyone 'soaped' their breasts tbh .

lucysnowe, yes indeed - and the grandchildren are always so fascinated by the seniors' sparkling conversation and unconventional trousers that they are no longer interested in playing 'video games' or cutting their hair short, but instead they immediately begin knitting, gardening, buffing furniture and using feminine wiles to manipulate their boyfriends. Happy days at last!

UQD - I love tvtropes.

Everyone works in an office apparently. Actually that's not just an assumption in books, all womens magazines do it too. Everyone works 9-5 (with occassional 'all-nighters' with takeaway chinese food) in an office where you have to wear high heels.

All the women I know who joined the police are either perfectly happy and sweet-natured, or else the kind of girls who liked to bully other girls at school, and now see the potential to get paid for being tiresome jobsworths. Not one AFAIK has any kind of history of arson or serial-killer contact in the family.

I like the Kate Atkinson book "When Will There Be Good News?" - there is a sterotype detective, but also a really clever detective who's a single mother to a teenage son. There's a few stereotypical "victim" types - teenage girl with gang connections, old mad lady, woman with tiny baby etc - but they are not wilting violets and the people who are the real victims (= dead at the end) are not any of these characters at all.

Have to agree with some other posts. If these books drive you so mad, why-oh-why do you keep 'poring over them' (to use another literary cliche)?!

There are so many great books out there - even great easy books, if you want a light read. (Who needs Nietzsche all the time, eh?!)

Yeah but you don't know which ones are going to crap until you're reading them. Especially irritating are the ones that someone mentioned, where there's a really good and interesting character who gets faded out as the story goes on, or falls in love if female, ceases to have a personality and morphs into a heap of "uncontrollable sobs" because all is not well with mr loverpants.

You never get

'Charlene took a drag of her Lambert & Butler. A swig of her warm Lambrini moistened her lips as Bradley looked on. 'Fancy a kebab & a shag?' he purred seductively. Charlene eyed him through her Avon mascara-drenched lashes. 'Make it a kebab & chips an' yer on'

I know several fellow writers who have been asked by their editors - who are all 26 and Sloaney types called Jessica and Melissa - to make their fiction "aspirational". So, even if the heroine is someone who'd normally shop at the small corner grocer, or Asda, she has to go to Waitrose and M&S. And so on.

If a childless woman has been trying to conceive for more than a month, the following is happening:

a) she and her husband are incompatible. The lack of pregnancy is A Subtle Metaphor for this; it will take her at least 27 chapters and 3 'familiar nagging pains in her back'/'ripping open a new box of Tampax with a grim face, in silence' to realise this.

b) he is shagging his new assitant.

c) she is partially responsible for the decline in the relationship, having stopped seeing him as anything other than 'a sperm bank'. He will 'quietly' declare this at some point, usually after she's discovered a condom in his wallet that proves point b.

d) but on the plus side, she is about to meet a new man and fall pregnant within 14 seconds of having her 'panties roughly hoisted to one side'.

The latter must chafe. We never hear of chafing. I wish to read a novel called 'Love Chafes'.

pmsl at "love chafes" - that would be funny, I'd read it!
I'd like to read a novel where the sex is mindblowingly disappointing or mundane for once. This does happen, probably far more often than the opposite. I know that novels are supposed to offer a level of escapism, but a touch of realism helps, imo.