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Well that’s unfortunate, unrealistic and highly improbable are my forte. The rules of writing are more like stable observations, everything is ultimately circumstantial. I guess my biggest personal peeve is lack of detail. A lot of internet fiction I’ve read take place in a vacuum, with the setting only vaguely described and characters who lack motivations or identities. Fan fiction tends to be especially guilty of this because novice or lazy authors may just assume we know the characters and setting. Failing to fill in the blanks makes immersing the reader into the story difficult. This makes the story inaccessible to newer readers, doesn’t convey what the author has in mind, and ultimately doesn’t build upon the established lore. Which I think is the whole point of fan fiction, never mind original works that need to be engrossing right out of the gate. Other than that, basic literacy errors that should have been corrected in grade school will turn me away. Such as spelling mistaiks, poorer grammar, missplaced!punctuation, verbing, run on sentances that go on and on and on, and sentences that end before they.

Fair enough. My YA characters also tend to be mythological beings which aren’t quite in the mainstream yet (certain types of yokai, fenrirs, huldra etc) so I really can’t get around doing at least a few lines of description. I think of it like scene setting: when you’ve set such a lush stage, why would your characters be fuzzy blobs moving around it? Alsoooo when you leave it up to the imagination, those imaginations tend to be whiiiiite…

Sometimes, something about a character’s appearance is relevant, and so I mention it. Maybe his eyes are a shade not customary where he’s living, or maybe he has a unique scar. But on the whole, I describe the minimum about a character’s appearance. As a reader, I don’t want an overload of details. I might not growl about it in a review, but I do prefer being able to put my own mental spin on a character.

@KassX You’re absolutely right. I’ve never heard someone ask for less, but I have wanted less too, and personally asked for less as a beta. You can definitely have too much, even in smut. I wonder if readers are just more forgiving of excess, or if they’re sooooo unforgiving of it that they won’t even dignify it with a comment, lol. @Desiderius Price That is absolutely my favourite amount of description. Just a sentence or two of relevant or distinct detail. If it were pages and pages, they’d definitely lose me. When I read, I just want to know what I need to know to visualize the scene without interrupting it with huge dumps.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. As a writer, I tend to prefer leaning on the reader’s imagination, I mean, they should have an imagination, right? Esp as that imagination can fill in the detail much more than my words can. So, my typical description of a character… a sentence of two, because, well, when I’m a reader, I find that pages and pages of description to be a pet peeve of mine.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I personally like a little bit of description to help me visualize, and in smut, visuals are kinda a priority, so you keep doing you. I tend to throw in little relevant details about character appearances throughout the story. I’d actually prefer to give more description of my main character, I just can never find the right moment. It was so much easier when my main character was a narcissist. Sigh. But yeah, I get readers asking for more description every now and then. Have you ever had a reader ask for less?

Pet PEEEEVES, omg you guys do not want to get me to start bitching because I will literally never stop, lol. I agree with so, so many of these. But here’s one that doesn’t happen too often but when it does, it pisses me off SO MUCH: writers who tell you not to describe your character’s physical appearance because it ‘ruins the reader’s mental image’. Fuck your image, my dude I mean look, I’m not the kind of girl to go off on three-page character descriptions from hair and eye color all the way to the single, curly hair on their left big toe, but firstly, I’ve had readers say they wish they had more physical description to picture the story better in their head and secondly, I tend to write stories set in metropolitan cities with lots of ethnic diversity. That diversity happens to be important to the story and to me! Now unless I give every POC character a ridiculous caricature of an ethnic name, that is just not going to get across without a physical description so PLEASE LET ME HELP YOU

It’s a good day when you get a first look at the cover art for your book, and it’s completely amazing!

Agree with all of you: When it comes to fiction writing, there can be no hard and fast rules. Yes, 98% of your sentences should have both a subject and a verb, but there’s that other 2% that are so much better if they have only one or the other, or neither. (“My name is Bond. James Bond.”) That said, rule-breaking only results in good writing when it’s done for a purpose, and not just because the writer doesn’t know the rules in the first place.