discardia

…To kill a good story: 

1. Overly flawed immoral main characters.  The AntiHero is ok, but characters that are weak, ineffectual and just get whipped around by the forces about them does not make for a good story.  It creates a whole bunch of apathy for your main character.  By the time I was halfway into the Thomas Convenant books, I could give a crap less if Thomas Covenant died and took his whiny monologues with him.
2. Overly descriptive and unneeded sex scenes - porn should stay in porn.  Seriously.  A good vampire book does not need a ton of homoeroticism or goth s&m to be good.
3. Rape or Murder with no connection to the plot is never ok.  It violates a couple of unspoken rules and just contributes to page filler.
4. Overly sadistic antagonists - evil just for the hell of it. It’s old.  Motivations would be nice.  Yeah, Cluthlu wants to destroy everything for no reason - and it was written a hundred years ago.  The alien evil thing has been done.
5. A first person story where the character is a child but speaks like an adult.  Oh yeah, that is believable.
6. Flowery words and other author ego masturbation tricks.  Leave your thesaurus on the damn shelf.
7. Action that is not described but implied.  I hate reading a scene where everything has happened so quickly and it is so muddled, even the main characters are confused.  Its ok when the situation is resolved later on, but it really pisses me off when IT NEVER IS.  That is just sloppy.
8. And add when the action that is occuring is so “metaphysical” that it is reduced down to a bunch of whitespace and random things flying by.  Ooooh gay!
9. No denounment.  I know some authors like leaving stuff up in the air for sequels or reader interpretation, but when there is no closure to the plot, it feels as if I could have skipped reading the book and get the same experience.
10. Too much JUMPING.  When a plot thread is two pages and then it jumps to the next one (looking at you, Dan Brown) and the focus just keeps getting bounced around like it is a broken projector… save it for gripping television.  Not a 400 page book with no resolution.  Double gay.