It's a generally accepted truism that no-one is perfect. 'Nobody's perfect!' we smugly cry as we face the fact we forgot our child's gym uniform/ missed our class at the dog show/ turned up to work late for the third morning in a row. We accept our own failings with equanimity, although we are often not so tolerant of others.
We tend to be less critical of our idols, though, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the literary world. Certain writers, both dead and alive, are often perceived to be above criticism.
Not to me, though. On the right day, in the right bad mood, I can find fault with anything. Here, then, is a selection of the annoying habits of some of the great figures of popular fiction. These are the things that, when you set yourself to emulate your favourite writer, ought to be the exceptions.
The thing about the writers I'm going to talk about today is that they are all really good writers. Seriously good, both in their craft and in their entertainment value, and massively successful as well. Of course they are - that's why we want to emulate them, isn't it? These guys are not third-rate hacks churning out rubbish; they are seasoned, developed, super-talented and their work has stood the test of time.
However. All of these guys have annoying habits that really piss me off when I read them. I'm pointing them out here to suggest that these are things to be sedulously avoided in your own work. Okay, so Stephen King can get away with it. That doesn't mean you will. You probably don't have the massive fan base he has.
ACCENTS
First on my list is Dickens. Often, when he writes dialogue with a working-class character, he rams it down our throat, over and over, with the spelling. Okay, so perhaps in his day working-class people pronounced 'v' as 'w'. So what? It gets very wearing, especially over the course of a long book, and most particularly when the material is not comic in its nature. Worst offenders are Martin Chuzzlewit and The Pickwick Papers. It isn't necessary, it has nothing to do with the plot, and if you can't show that your character is a member of a particular social class without phonetic spelling then you're not a very good writer. Dickens was a very good writer, so he had no excuse for ramming this down our throats with every sentence out of the characters' mouths.
Another offender in this category is Stephen King. Most of his books are set in and around Maine, his own stamping ground. Very sensible, too. There's a particular regional accent and dialect. Okay, fine. And of course you want your locals to sound natural. But it really isn't necessary to contort your spelling in every single speech. The first couple of times the character speaks is enough to establish a particular accent. I am reminded to be mindful of this myself, as one of my main characters in my current work is from South America. You want to show particularities of speech, but for heaven's sake don't grab your reader by the scruff and rub his nose in it.
CLOTHING
Constantly describing everyone's clothes like a David Jones catalogue is not cool. The person who irritates me the most with this is Robert Jordan. In his Wheel of Time series there is a group of women who invariably dress in dark skirts and white blouses. That point is made quite early in the series, that it's like a uniform for these women. If he'd left it at that it would have been fine, but all through the entire, long series, he hardly mentions one of these people without reminding us that she has on a dark skirt and a white blouse. Seriously, who cares? I'm not talking about some context where it's relevant, e.g. when one of them is sneaking about at night and her white blouse causes the sentry to spot her in the dark. Just ordinary situations, where clothing is mostly completely irrelevant. For the love of Chanel, don't do this!
WORDS
Some writers have a favourite word that they feel they have to drag in at every opportunity. It's not a very serious fault, but it can become extremely irritating when the word is used over and over again over the course of a long book. My example here is Stephen Donaldson and the word 'intransigencce' in the Thomas Covenant series.
BELIEFS
We all have our beliefs, social, religious, and political. And no doubt those beliefs are going to become apparent in our work. Every writer reveals this kind of thing about himself; one can hardly write without doing so. But that doesn't make it okay to lecture your reader. Don't stop in the middle of a novel to deliver a five-page sermon about free love, or capitalism, or not wearing black with navy, or really anything at all. And no, it doesn't make it any better if you wrap quotes around it and have it come out of the mouth of a character. Just don't do this, people! It makes you look like an idiot. The worst offender in this category is Robert Heinlein, who has marred many otherwise fine books with his self-indulgent ranting.
Can we take a general principle out of this? Yes, I think we can; it is that excess in anything is generally to be deplored. This is one of the applications of Stephen King's often misunderstood exhortation to 'kill your darlings'. The 'darlings' are things to which you are inordinately attached, whether it's describing accents, cataloguing people's clothing, your political and economic beliefs, or even your favourite word. Overdoing these things is like wearing a classic Chanel suit and adding 54 pieces of Goldmark jewellery. It obscures and spoils your style.
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