Obnoxious Tropes

Preamble: Writing is hard, and the longer I do it, the worse it feels to drag other writers. I can’t imagine too many people set out to write bad stories, and I believe that most writers want to write something good.

Plus, the more widely I read, the more I realize it’s unfair to slam a writer for conforming to the expectations of a genre just because that genre doesn’t exactly appeal to me. Sometimes a contrived coincidence is just part of the formula.

But there’s still a LOT of bad writing out there, so, (mostly) without naming any particular names, I’m going to let the hate flow through me.

• Serious=Shouting Character: Particularly infuriating in mystery protagonists, a character who constantly shouts down, ignores, and overrides the characters around them because they are serious characters doing serious jobs. The part that I really hate is when the character suffers no consequences for constantly shouting at others, not even mild dislike from their coworkers. If only they could solve the mystery of interiority…

• Bad Title Drops: There’s a reason that “What are we, some kind of… Suicide Squad?” earned the internet’s scorn. Titles can be hard. Shoehorning them into a scene to justify them is worse than no explanation at all.

• Tin-ear Dialogue: A timeless sin (looking at you Plato).

• Two-Dimensional Villains: Also seems to come up more in the mystery genre than others, but I refuse to accept it as the norm. “The murderer did a murder to show them all. He was a murderer. Not like those non-murderers. He does murder, because it’s who he is… A MURDERER.” Do better.

• The Bad Guy Conveniently Wrote Down the Whole Plan!: (Last bullet point taken from the Murderer’s Murder Diary, NO COPS ALLOWED!). But really, any genre with an antagonist can do this. And too many do. Unless you’re a procedural crime show who has to fit a mystery, a myth arc, a will-they/won’t-they romance, and contractually-obligated product placement into your draft, you’ve got no excuse.