I'm doing some fun reading before I delve into required reading for school.
I'm annoyed.
I understand authors have different styles from mine, but there are certain habits that just irritate me to no end. It doesn't matter if the author is a newbie or a world famous figure. The book I'm currently reading boasts that the author is a NY Times bestseller, and the category is contemporary romance. To set the scene, it's 'alpha male, self-made rich CEO type.' Here are my Yes - Def No notes:
YES - alpha male, muscular, tough, worldly cowboy.
NO - I just met the character and I KNOW he would NOT use a word like "freakadilly." That silly word is more suited to the effervescent, optimistic female main character. If the reader can pick this up, why didn't the agent/editor/copyeditor?
YES - Describe the scene, the mood, the thoughts, the kiss, etc.
NO - Don't stay stuck in the 3 -3 pattern: 3 lines of 3 adjectives. That's a total of 9 descriptive adjectives (especially when you repeat them....). Overkill and tedious.
YES - Show the kiss.
NO - Diminish the tension because we're so in her head that there was no kiss back action from her. this gorgeous guy is giving her a lethal kiss and she's.... contemplating.
YES - Tell us he left town ten years ago; we get a picture of a strained homecoming, tense relationships.
NO - Don't keep repeating it, we remember.
YES - Close eyes during a kiss.
NO - Don't give me 2 pages of thought and action before she closes her eyes. Is she staring at him the whole time?
YES - There are always doubts about a budding relationship.
NO - Please don't make the 26-year-old female character sound like a high school teenager: yes he likes me, no he doesn't, yes, no, yes, no constantly.
Also, the punctuation and sentence structure didn't always jive; too many times the sentences were choppy and there were too many unnecessary exclamation points. It made the text read as juvenile.
Purple prose. Too many times the prose got out of hand and I found myself skipping ahead a few lines.
Crepuscular? Who uses that word? As Beatrix Potter (Tales of Peter Rabbit) said, "the shorter and the plainer, the better."
I get irked when a love scene is so dragged out with too much thinking; the character is stopping in the middle of physical action to give us a treatise on life, love, and the future.
I'm barely halfway through the book. I don't think the second half will be much different, but I'll finish it with the hope that it will improve. I'll let you know how it goes.
Char
