Talking About Love

[ysabetwordsmith]

Nicola Griffith has a cool post on the way her characters talk about love.  It includes the observation that she can't stand being in the heads of characters who don't know and speak their own feelings.

Me, I find it entertaining to watch the sparks fly between a character who is emotionally fluent and one who is not.  There are other things I strongly dislike, though -- stupidity is a big one for me.  Both as a reader and a writer, I hate it when characters do obviously stupid things, or especially, keep making the same mistake over and over again.  I also dislike characters who let other people mistreat them and don't do anything about it.

What are some of your literary turn-offs?

Comments

[aldersprig.livejournal.com]

Hrrm. Literary turn-offs.... characters who don't learn. Characters who spend too long in woe-is-me and not enough getting back on their feet. Selfish, greedy, self-centered characters.

But mostly, the biggest deal-breaker for me is characters that are just unbelievable.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I guess "characters who don't learn" would be a broader version of my "stupid" and "same mistakes" turn-offs.

Re: Thoughts

[aldersprig.livejournal.com]

Very likely! :-)

I also don't like people who don't learn...

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I have a planned romance between two characters who have been wounded by the world, and neither one of them is aware of their feelings, or are aware but in denial. It's Forizano and Lyria. What's strange is, Lyria thinks nobody outside of her artificial family could love her, especially knowing - no less seeing - some of the horrible things she's done. And Forizano seems to be falling in love with Lyria despite his horror at some of the things she's done. Well, we shall see how that progresses.

As to literary turn offs, I'm not sure. Dull writing, I guess. Oh, and I never could read "The Handmaid's Tale" because it was too terrifying to me. I think I'd rather mock Hyperion's Shrike than be a woman in The Handmaid's Tale universe.

Also, I hate bigots, homophobes, sexists, and characters that are sexist or racist stereotypes. I've heard enough about the Twilight series to have negative interest in it.

I also can't stand rapists. But I can tolerate the presence of the worst characters by hoping they get poetic justice. Because poetic justice makes me laugh. In a series called The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer, a man rapes one of his female coworkers (though he wore a mask, so she didn't know who he was). She became friends with a Neanderthal scientist from an alternate universe, and I forget how he figured out who the rapist was, but he did (she didn't; I think it had something to do with scent), and because she had said she wouldn't testify or even report the rape (or something like that), he goes off, finds the guy at home, tells the guy he's going to pay for what he did (because Neanderthal scientist guy has a strong sense of justice). He forcibly removes the guy's testicles (the Neanderthal punishment for all first-offense violent crimes committed by males), then as an added bonus says he's gonna make the rapist know what it feels like to be a woman, and rapes him in the ass. I laughed so hard I literally fell out of bed, and it took about 20 minutes to stop laughing.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>Well, we shall see how that progresses.<<

Kewl.

>>As to literary turn offs, I'm not sure. Dull writing, I guess.<<

So far, the only unbreakable rule I've found in writing is Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Reader.

>>Also, I hate bigots, homophobes, sexists, and characters that are sexist or racist stereotypes. <<

Yeah. I only put up with those if they are going to be Made To Deal With It or eventually Come To A Bad End.

>>I laughed so hard I literally fell out of bed, and it took about 20 minutes to stop laughing.<<

I love that scene too.

I once wrote a scene in which someone raped a nanotechnologist. And then his genitals dissolved.

Re: Thoughts

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I once wrote a scene in which someone raped a nanotechnologist. And then his genitals dissolved.

LOL!

Lyria can read minds, and takes no shit from anyone. If anyone were foolish enough to try to rape her, she'd turn them inside out (literally) before they could attempt it. She was almost raped once in her adolescence, she's not going to let it happen again.

Yes, when she was a teenager, she was almost raped. I'll PM you what happened as a result.

EDIT: Remembered it was only an *attempted* rape, not a successful one.

Nokwahl, from my Traipah stories, was raped as a child. When she finally found the culprit, she left him... crippled? I'm unsure how to classify what she did to him, as he isn't human or even humanoid.