9 Things Readers HATE in a Novel

just one of these mistakes can make a reader hate your book but don't worry in this video it's not going to be a long gripe Fest of everything that's going wrong I'm also going to give you very specific advice on how you can avoid these mistakes and the very first one that we're going to tackle is sequel baiting sequel baiting is real it's affected you and it's affected those you love when the end of a novel doesn't wrap up cleanly but instead just entices you to try to buy the next novel that's sequel baiting and

I think there are two ways that you can try to avoid this in your own book the first is keeping your order of priorities right your first priority always needs to be wrapping up this particular book making the reader satisfied with this index and then say a secondary priority is making the reader want to buy the next book and figure out what happens next now the trouble comes when you invert those priorities and you make the most important thing getting the reader to buy the next book rather than you know closing off this story a

second thing you should absolutely do is think about the percentage of resolution you're offering if you are resolving say I don't know 30% of the open story lines on a particular novel and yet you're leaving 70% of them open your readers are going to be very dissatisfied with that they're going to feel cheated the much better thing that you should do is Resolve say 95% of open story lines and then just dangle one thing at the end that will make the reader a little bit curious about what happens in the sequel this next one is

something that makes me personally very angry and it is number two endings that change the genre this is when you have a story that's bumbling along going going and then suddenly when you reach the climax or the end the book changes to a completely different genre for an example of this look at Indiana Jones Kingdom of the Crystal Skull so the story is going along it feels like a normal Indiana Jones movie but then out of nowhere it was aliens at the end so the genre was oh it's campy adventure and then shifts radically at

the end to sci-fi really the problem here is similar to a DSX mcha where basically a god comes down into the play and sort of solves all the problems for people so the issue with this is not only are your characters becoming very passive it's also that an outside force is swooping in and solving all the problems in the book so the solution to this is pretty simple your endings have to correspond to the genre that you've set up over the course of the entire book now if you're struggling with endings and you want a

little more help on it uh I would recommend subscribing to book Fox Academy specifically check out the write your best novel course because it helps you with stuff like what happens before the climax what are the main things you should do in a climax what are common mistakes in the climax and then endings and looking at case studies of endings and helping authors figure out exactly what the right ending is for their book anyhow check it out it's helped a lot of authors already I think it can help you too the third one is probably

my biggest pet peeve when reading a book and it is number three good characters presented as evil and vice versa so I should say right off the bat that this is not Universal what I find moral might be completely different than what you find moral but as a reader when I sense that the author is trying to warp my moral compass in some way that makes me very very angry I'm going to give you a very silly example of this and then I'm going to give you two more serious ones in Love Actually remember the

guy who's in love with his best friend's wife it's played off in the movie is he's like oh like innocent and sweet sort of puppy love but like dude this guy is a creepy weird stalker who only films her at the wedding and then comes to her house with those little note cards and gets a kiss from her I mean he's really giving off these crazy stalker Vibes am I wrong so for a little more serious example let's look at celest in little fires everywhere the frustration I had with this book is that she seemed

to judge characters as good or evil based on their identity rather than what they did so the rich person is evil not because of what she does but simply because she's rich and the poor person is good not because she does anything that's particularly good but simply because she's poor that really rubbed me the wrong way and honestly I that book feeling like my moral apprehension of the main characters was completely different than the authors and for a third example let's look at John updikes rabbit run I'm going to level with you right now I

absolutely detest John Updike absolutely hate the guy and I'll tell you why in Rabbit Run he writes this monstrously narcissistic character just this real scumbag of a human being and then makes this guy into a hero and pretends that he's perfectly normal I felt like I was being gaslighted for the entire novel and the trouble was I didn't think that the author knew that this character probably based on him was a horrible human being but I knew he was a horrible human being I'm going to side with what David Foster Wallace said about Updike he

called him a penis with a thesaurus and I think that's probably the best dig I've ever heard about an author so what's the solution to this the solution is you got to know your audience you have to make sure that your moral sensibilities are going to match what your reader moral sensibilities are and you can't please everyone right but different audiences are going to have different sensus of morality you just want to make sure that your ideal reader is going to really connect with who is good and who is evil in your book the fourth

thing that readers hate and honestly this is kind of a funny one is characters making stupid decisions just to serve the plot now you can find this across every single genre right there no genre is exempt from this but but I am going to pick on one genre right now the horror genre because how many times in the horror genre do you see a person walking to towards that door that nobody wants them to open and nobody thinks it's a good idea but they're going to open that door so you have characters crawling into a

pipe to investigate a corpse in jeepers creepers and I Know What You Did Last Summer you have characters who are running for their life but just before they make it a safety they just stop and turn around or there are extremely clear signs that something is really messed up with the house and the characters just seem to ignore it all now why did they do this well I mean it's because the plot would be very boring if nobody gets killed but the solution is a little bit harder to implement you have to make sure that

the decisions that a character makes stems from their motivations from their Psychology from their personality they cannot decide to do something which is completely out of step with who the reader understands them to be if they are a smart person then you need to justify if they make a bad decision or a dumb decision every choice that they make in your book should stem from their deepest sense of self now the next mistake which can really really turn readers off is number five preachy novels now listen I'm all about messages in a book there's nothing

wrong with that right we write books because sometimes we have ideas that we want to get across but but don't go too far and make it preachy or propaganda the French actually came up with this very useful division to talk about this particular topic they divide between novel of ideas and the thesis novel now the novel of ideas is just a novel which grapples with a whole bunch of ideas sometimes contradictory ideas it's not lecturing but it's bringing up really serious topics to wrestle with a thesis novel on the other hand is very much propaganda

there is one right answer and they are going to hammer you over the head with it to make sure no reader could possibly miss the point they're making now whether you agree with the message in einan's Atlas Shrugged is kind of beside the point I think we can all agree that that is a thesis novel and the premier example of that would be say an 80 page speech by John G where he clearly lays out like all of Ein Ran's ideas about objectivism so what do you do to avoid this mistake one I think you

have to get very clearly in your head what is fiction and what is nonfiction if your goal is solely create a message then you have to ask yourself do I really want to be writing a non-fiction book instead and if you decide to write fictional books then you have to stick with that genre you can't suddenly transition in the middle and start just writing essays in the middle of your book making your points the goal in a novel of ideas is to allow the story itself to make the point and allow the characters how they

change what decisions they make allow them to make the point so for a very simplified example of this I have edited more than a thousand children's books and sometimes at the end authors will have like a couple of pages explaining what the point of the story was and 99% of the time I have to tell them look rely upon the power of the story to make your point the story is already like teaching you that bullying is bad you don't need to say hey kids bullying is bad at the end it's too heavy you're hammering

the reader over the head and it's just redundant now the last way that you can avoid this mistake is don't start your book with the message or the theme and I don't mean don't have it on the first page or something like that what I mean don't start with is when you're thinking about a book don't start your whole process by being like this is the idea I want to get across no you start with character you start with a scene you start with something Concrete in the real world and as you go through the

writing process then the themes and the points emerge naturally inside of the story but the story has to be first and foremost and now it's time for the next dangerous mistake which is number six Exposition aimed at the reader so I'm just going to give you a really silly example of this so you know what I'm talking about you know how your daughter died a year ago and you've been struggling to keep your spirits up during the zombie apocalypse which wiped out 99% of humanity and the other guy's like yeah dialogue is not a place

to explain backstory I'll say it again dialogue is not a place to explain backstory now of course you can mention things obliquely but if you're finding that a character is being like this is what happened and we both know it then you're probably doing expository dialogue the goal with dialogue the goal is figure out what would realistically be said in this conversation put yourself in their shoes what they actually say to one another now of course you have to have in the back of your head okay what sort of information does the reader need to

know as well but the first and foremost thing is what would these characters actually say to one another this next point is one that I'm sure has pissed off many of you and it's number seven rushed endings now I don't have a point with you ending your story in media race right if you're ending in a particular pivotal moment say before a character decision or something those type of ambiguous endings can work quite well for some books what I do have a problem with with and what I think a lot of readers have a problem

with is major major plot points being resolved really quickly like almost brushed over listen your reader has been waiting the entire novel for this payoff so when you get to the payoff don't rush through that like that's the reward they've been looking for and a second thing that's super annoying is really huge character arcs suddenly and abruptly resolved in some way so you see major character change and like the antagonist is suddenly like oh like a generally nice guy and has a huge change of heart you can't rush something like that you really have to

take your time in a scene and make the reader believe that that character change is real and then the third thing I'd tell you to do to avoid a rushed ending is make sure your internal conflict is resolved just as much as the external conflict what I see as an editor and by the way I'm opening up some slots for editing so if you are watching this video and you would like to get some editing from me check the link in the description and you can see my rates and sort of how I work but

back to the topic what I see as an editor is that authors will resolve the all the external conflict but they really give short Thrift to resolving the internal conflict that we've cared about for the entire storyline now internal conflict could be something like them being really cowardly at the beginning and suddenly they're a lot braver at the end it could be something like affection and not revealing their affection or being too timid at the beginning but at the end like they outright say it and and tell someone they love them I mean I mean

internal can be a lot of different things but you have to focus on internals just as much as you do on the externals if you want the ending to feel satisfying then my final rule for making sure that endings don't feel rushed is make sure the ending is proportional if you are writing a 500 page book you're going to need 10 to 15 pages to wrap everything up after the climax you just got to take that amount of time now if your book's 150 Pages then sure yeah you might need say only three to five

pages to wrap things up but I think authors get in trouble when they have like a huge book and then the story completely wraps up in two or three pages and the reader's like I feel blindsided like the story can't end that quickly remember that the ending the story is a way to Usher the reader out of your world and back into the real world that takes time okay so don't rush the process the eighth mistake that a lot of writers make is treating the audience as if they're stupid one example of this would be

simply having too much explanation remember that explanation in your novel works on sort of a bell curve right and over here you have way too much explanation and you're treating the reader as stupid over here you have way too little explanation and the reader's confused so the goal is to hit that sweet spot right in the center and make sure the reader has just enough so they can feel like they're figuring things out and not so little they're confused or so much that they feel like you think they're stupid and I'll give you an example

of this so I read a large variety of genres I think you can tell from the examples I use in my videos and one of the things I read is sci-fi I started up a sci-fi book club years ago and we read this book called The Legacy of harat by Larry nibon halfway through the book I realized oh this is a retelling of Beowolf because they killed this beast and then suddenly the mother comes around and they're like oh no now as a reader I felt smart for figuring out oh like this is a retelling

of bolf but you know what they did after that point they mentioned bolf like a hundred times they called all the creatures grenal they had characters talking about The Narrative of Beowolf and like how this story mirrored it and I'm like you know I just feel like you're treating me like I'm dumb right now like I figured it out and now you're bashing me over the head now this piece of advice definitely depends on your audience you have to figure out for your particular audience what is too much explanation and what's too little explanation but

once you figure that out I beg you don't explain too much to the reader and the ninth thing that readers hate when they encounter it in a novel is unnecessary redundancies now this can take a lot of different forms but let me give you three different examples the first one is dialogue recap this is a character telling another character what's happened but if the reader already knows what's happened it's really really boring for them cuz they're like I know this already really your goal in a situation like that is just summarize it you know say

this character told this character what had happened there one sentence you're done a second thing that feels really redundant is repeating the stakes now don't get me wrong you do need to repeat the stakes once or twice so the reader knows what's at stake like the stakes are very important but what I see sometimes in books is that they'll be repeated four five six times and I'm like I know what the stakes already stop saying it so much like if we don't get to X place like we're all going to die I get it a

third redundancy which can be super annoying is physical traits or gestures if that character fondles the locket with their picture of their dead lover in it one more time I'm going to go Bonkers or or if the author calls her a feisty redhead one more time I am going to throw this book across the room look it's fine on the first draft to write your book really messily just make sure and you cut out all those redundancies in the editing process so you don't annoy the reader and once again check out the link in the

description to the write your best novel course and also to the book Fox Academy if you want access to all my courses and good luck with your writing