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Pet peeves in novels, novellas, short stories, and other literature

theprestige

Penultimate Amazing
theprestige
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The Antimemetics Division
We've got this thread for movies, videogames, and the Internet. I figure it's time to give literature it's due.

I'll start with: Jackals. Specifically, jackals in westerns. I have recently come across two titles, A Congregation of Jackals and The Hangman Feeds the Jackal, that are set in the "wild west" period of North America.

But jackals are not native to North America. Their presence in the narrative, whether literal or figurative, makes no sense. Native American legends would not speak of them. Cowboys, gunslingers, homesteaders, and stagecoach drivers would not be concerned about them.

There are three species of jackal, and even today none of them has a range that extends to the new world. Yet somehow, in two cases, an author and their editor have conspired to place them front and center in a story about the American West.
 
theprestige said:
We've got this thread for movies, videogames, and the Internet. I figure it's time to give literature it's due.

I'll start with: Jackals. Specifically, jackals in westerns. I have recently come across two titles, A Congregation of Jackals and The Hangman Feeds the Jackal, that are set in the "wild west" period of North America.

But jackals are not native to North America. Their presence in the narrative, whether literal or figurative, makes no sense. Native American legends would not speak of them. Cowboys, gunslingers, homesteaders, and stagecoach drivers would not be concerned about them.

There are three species of jackal, and even today none of them has a range that extends to the new world. Yet somehow, in two cases, an author and their editor have conspired to place them front and center in a story about the American West.
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Typos. I've even seen them in comic books. One I recently read had several of them. Odd because they aren't really typos -- they are generally hand-lettered. Or, they used to be. But I was reading an older one.
For a professional publication that has to go through an editor and a proofreader that is unacceptable.
 
I was curious about the use of the word "jackal" and found this in the wikipedia entry for coyoteWP
The earliest written reference to the species comes from the naturalist Francisco Hernández's Plantas y Animales de la Nueva España (1651), where it is described as a "Spanish fox" or "jackal".
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I haven't found anything that says it was ever a commonplace name for the coyote though.
 
A writer, especially one who had an editor review the book, should not be using 'there's' when they mean there are: 'they're' should be used unless it's dialogue.

And using 'theirs' when it refers to 'his', 'hers' or 'its' is just not working out for me. Every time I write it using a plural pronoun when a singular one is called for I know it will confuse some readers.
 
American Jackal

Canis latrans (American Jackal) is a species of mammals in the family Canidae. They are native to El Salvador, Belize, The Nearctic, Guatemala, United States, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Canada, and Nicaragua. They are nocturnal carnivores. Individuals are known to live for 262 months and can grow to 872.39 mm. They have parental care (paternal care and female provides care). They rely on running to move around.
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Canis latrans is the coyote. "American jackal" is an uncommon alternative name, which I suspect is found mainly outside North America. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that very few, if any, 19th Century Americans used it.
 
Recycling characters: when the author writes too many books and starts bringing the same characters back repeatedly but gives them different names and maybe a slightly different physical description. I've seen it repeatedly in everything from low-brow fantasy to quite good mystery, from good authors and middling and bad authors.

It's especially egregious when it happens in the same book where an author brings back for real a past character...but changes their characterization utterly. In one author's case in her third book in the series a major character was an intelligent, cynical, sardonic man. Fifteen years later she brought him back and made him a silly, credulous fuddy-duddy and then cuckolded him on top of it! She should at least have added in a line "oh yeah, he hasn't been the same since that traumatic brain injury that utterly changed him".
 
alfaniner said:
Typos. I've even seen them in comic books. One I recently read had several of them. Odd because they aren't really typos -- they are generally hand-lettered. Or, they used to be. But I was reading an older one.
For a professional publication that has to go through an editor and a proofreader that is unacceptable.
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It's funny. I'm well aware of the distinction between its and it's. I know it clearly and avoid mistaking one for the other in my writing. But sometimes, on the fly, my hands just do the other thing and I miss it.
 
Wudang said:
I was curious about the use of the word "jackal" and found this in the wikipedia entry for coyoteWP


I haven't found anything that says it was ever a commonplace name for the coyote though.
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My guess is that the central Asian and sub-Saharan African species were familiar at least by report to natural philosophers of that time period. It doesn't surprise me that naturalists of that period might have used the old-world word to refer to the new-world animal.

It wouldn't even surprise me if the old-world word became the de facto term for the new-world animal, leaving it to later taxonomists to unravel the tangle of species nomenclature. But that's not what happened. Jackals have no place in a wild west story. Not unless it's the story of How Anubis Came to Apache Wells.
 
alfaniner said:
Typos. I've even seen them in comic books. One I recently read had several of them. Odd because they aren't really typos -- they are generally hand-lettered. Or, they used to be. But I was reading an older one.
For a professional publication that has to go through an editor and a proofreader that is unacceptable.
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I've mentioned before trying a book on kindle and the first word is the name of the main character. It's misspelled. "Quenctin" instead of "Quentin". At first I assumed it was one of those silly fantasy things where authors slightly change western names of nouns to seem a little strange. But no.
 
I assume a lot of the typos in Kindle editions are down to smudged text pushing the limits of the optical character recognition software used to scan the physical book into digital format.
 
theprestige said:
I assume a lot of the typos in Kindle editions are down to smudged text pushing the limits of the optical character recognition software used to scan the physical book into digital format.
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Sure but that seems unlikely. It sold well enough to be made into a TV series. The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I gave it a second chance but after the time taken to describe the main characters favourite books - a barely disguised Narnia - I regretted not having bought a physical copy that I could throw at the wall.
 
Wudang said:
Sure but that seems unlikely. It sold well enough to be made into a TV series. The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I gave it a second chance but after the time taken to describe the main characters favourite books - a barely disguised Narnia - I regretted not having bought a physical copy that I could throw at the wall.
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Oh. If it's The Magicians by Lev Grossman, everything I've heard is that it's got crap production value from writing to editing to publishing to adaptation.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
There is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackal_(disambiguation)



Sorry. I can't support this with a YouTube link.
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If you could support it with citations from Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Elmore Leonard, or Larry McMurtry, I'd likely change my mind. The stories I mentioned come highly recommended, and are a subgenre I'd like to read more of. If jackal turns out to be a period accurate term, carrying on down to modernity, I'm in. If it's just a weakass Wikipedia entry? Not so much.
 
theprestige said:
It's funny. I'm well aware of the distinction between its and it's. I know it clearly and avoid mistaking one for the other in my writing. But sometimes, on the fly, my hands just do the other thing and I miss it.
Click to expand...

(more for the IRL Peeves thread, but still related)
I used to always be sure I was posting it correctly. Now, after years of reading typos and ignorance (I did assume yours was the former) I have to stop and think about which usage is proper. AutoCorrect doesn't help much if it has to be proofread and corrected all the time.
 
Absurd language coincidences.

(I'm quoting from memory)

"He realised that the inhabitants were speaking a rare dialect of Hawaiian, which he had not heard since he was a child."
 
Wudang said:
Sounds right. "This is not a book to be put down lightly. This is a book to be thrown away with great force"
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I still have a scar on my face from a copy of the Analects of Confucius inaccurately hurled by a fellow student, many years ago.
 
Great detectives with sidekicks who are utterly incompetent.

Arthur Hastings is the prime example. There's no way Hercule Poirot would have such an inept partner. Even Christie herself saw the mistake of having such an idiot as a sidekick and did her best to write him out (literally in one case - she removed him from later drafts of one novel).
 
jeremyp said:
Great detectives with sidekicks who are utterly incompetent.

Arthur Hastings is the prime example. There's no way Hercule Poirot would have such an inept partner. Even Christie herself saw the mistake of having such an idiot as a sidekick and did her best to write him out (literally in one case - she removed him from later drafts of one novel).
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Reminds me of the sitcom trope of idiot schlub man with the smart and lovely wife.
 
theprestige said:
My guess is that the central Asian and sub-Saharan African species were familiar at least by report to natural philosophers of that time period. It doesn't surprise me that naturalists of that period might have used the old-world word to refer to the new-world animal.

It wouldn't even surprise me if the old-world word became the de facto term for the new-world animal, leaving it to later taxonomists to unravel the tangle of species nomenclature. But that's not what happened. Jackals have no place in a wild west story. Not unless it's the story of How Anubis Came to Apache Wells.
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The Wikipedia article suggests this is the case. I searched the NYT archive back to 1851, and there were no hits for 'American jackal', and only one for 'American jackals', with the latter, from 2014, clearly being used in a figurative sense. Conversely, there were over 8000 hits for 'coyote' or 'coyotes'.

Searching just for 'jackal' or 'jackals' before 1901 gives 30 hits. I don't have a subscription, so I can't read the text of these articles, but most of the headlines show or suggest that they either refer to jackals in Eurasia or Africa (e.g., "THE FAMINE IN INDIA.; Victims Die in the Roads and Are Eaten by Jackals."), or else that the use is figurative (e.g., "Movements of the Peace Democrats.").
 
My biggest pet peeve in literature is when a well-known author puts their name on some first-time writer's novel. I made the mistake of reading one of the pieces of crap that James Patterson put his name on. It started with an interesting premise, but was just terrible after that and had no satisfying ending.
 
There's a brief scene in The Exorcist, in which a homicide detective asks a morgue attendant for directions to the morgue. Blatty records the attendant's response thusly:

"It's right this way," he said laconically.

First, that's not laconic.

Second, "laconically" isn't the kind of attiribute you narrate to the reader. It's the kind of attribute the reader picks up from the way the character expresses themselves in the text. If the character is truly laconic, you don't need to tell the reader.

Third, don't tell the reader a character is being laconic when they're not being laconic.

Fourth, even that little bit of prolix prose is more character development than that particular character needs. If you want to make one of your characters laconic, make it a character whose personality and attributes actually stick around for more than one scene.

---

Speaking of The Exorcist, which is an otherwise mostly excellent novel: If you thought maybe the homicide detective was based on TV detective Columbo, listen to the audiobook narrated by William Peter Blatty himself, and remove all doubt. His voicing of Detective Kinderman crosses the line from homage to plagiarism.
 
theprestige said:
Second, "laconically" isn't the kind of attiribute you narrate to the reader. It's the kind of attribute the reader picks up from the way the character expresses themselves in the text. If the character is truly laconic, you don't need to tell the reader.
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On the other hand, I once saw an author (I can't remember who) claim that a truly skilled writer shouldn't have to include "(character name) said", "he replied", and similar text in their dialogue, instead conveying to the reader who is speaking purely through what they say.
I didn't buy it.
 
Armitage72 said:
On the other hand, I once saw an author (I can't remember who) claim that a truly skilled writer shouldn't have to include "(character name) said", "he replied", and similar text in their dialogue, instead conveying to the reader who is speaking purely through what they say.
I didn't buy it.
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Yeah, that would peeve me to no end.

Which reminds me of another peeve: Writers who get too big for their editors. You can tell, sometimes, when a writer has become profitable enough that they don't have to pay as much attention to their editor. I hate it when that happens. Because that's how you get stylistic pratfalls like going three pages without giving the reader any markers for who is saying what.
 
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jeremyp said:
Great detectives with sidekicks who are utterly incompetent.

Arthur Hastings is the prime example. There's no way Hercule Poirot would have such an inept partner. Even Christie herself saw the mistake of having such an idiot as a sidekick and did her best to write him out (literally in one case - she removed him from later drafts of one novel).
Click to expand...


I've read that Christie created Hastings because she felt Poirot needed a Watson. However, as the series progressed, she decided that wasn't the case, and so packed the character off to Argentina, bringing him back only occasionally. Additionally, whatever his faults, Hastings is brave, loyal, and good in a fight.

That said, when I was in college, most of the members of my gaming group regularly watched Poirot and Sherlock Holmes (partly as inspiration for Call of Cthulhu and Cthulhu by Gaslight). We once had an extended discussion about how Watson is so much more useful than Hastings.
 
theprestige said:
Which reminds me of another peeve: Writers who get too big for their editors. You can tell, sometimes, when a writer has become profitable enough that they don't have to pay as much attention to their editor. I hate it when that happens. Because that's how you get stylistic pratfalls like going three pages without giving the reader any markers for who is saying what.
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I enjoy David Weber's books, but he's gotten to the point that the publisher/editor won't even tell him "Maybe this should be split into two books". They just keep getting longer and longer, until they can be used as effective bludgeoning weapon.
 
theprestige said:
I assume a lot of the typos in Kindle editions are down to smudged text pushing the limits of the optical character recognition software used to scan the physical book into digital format.
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Yeah but in one example from literally the best selling novelist of all time the Kindle edition has 4 typos in the 1st paragraph, and not like typos that make one word into another word but like typos that make a word into something that isn't a word.

There's literally no way they would slip past a spell check program from 20 years ago or the most cursory glance at the page.

And the Kindle Edition was published in 2016 and still hasn't been updated or fixed.
 
This is more of a "thing I miss" rather than a pet peeve but I wish more authors would do that thing were they tell you what's going to happen in that chapter, like "Wherein we find out what happened to the Butler" is the actual chapter name or something like that.

They were never, to my knowledge, the norm but they weren't uncommon in old books. Now they still pop up from time to time; Stephen King will use them occasionally, but are rare and even then when you do see them they seem sort of like an affectation, a bit of whimsy.

I think they went away for the same reason narration in movies largely has; they were seen as a cheat, a lazy way to get information across, but much like narration in movies when done properly I kind of like them.
 
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novaphile said:
Absurd language coincidences.

(I'm quoting from memory)

"He realised that the inhabitants were speaking a rare dialect of Hawaiian, which he had not heard since he was a child."
Click to expand...

I could rant for many hours about linguistic absurdities in novels. Cases that particularly get my goat are when characters can identify an obscure language from a brief passage, when they can translate a language efficiently from having some knowledge of a related language, and when spending fifteen minutes in a country is enough to speak the local language fluently and idiomatically.

Oh yes, and having done a couple of years of university courses in a language means you can speak it fluently with no discernible accent.
 
SpitfireIX said:
I've read that Christie created Hastings because she felt Poirot needed a Watson. However, as the series progressed, she decided that wasn't the case, and so packed the character off to Argentina, bringing him back only occasionally. Additionally, whatever his faults, Hastings is brave, loyal, and good in a fight.

That said, when I was in college, most of the members of my gaming group regularly watched Poirot and Sherlock Holmes (partly as inspiration for Call of Cthulhu and Cthulhu by Gaslight). We once had an extended discussion about how Watson is so much more useful than Hastings.
Click to expand...
Physicians as sidekicks/foils were somewhat common.
Petrie, in the Fu Manchu is a Watson, but not a Hastings.
Trowbridge was rather Scully to de Grandin's Mulder.

Though most of the belief in the 'Watson as an idiot' trope is down to the Rathbone films.
 
If you want to talk specific peeves ...

Cars tracked "by GPS" where the author apparently thinks that all navigation systems in cars somehow transmit the car's location back to satellites.

Geostationary satellites located over places not on the equator. More than once I have read in novels where a satellite is apparently able to hover over some non-equitorial location.

Sci-Fi novels where you have to look up every other word in a glossary.
 
catsmate said:
Physicians as sidekicks/foils were somewhat common.
Petrie, in the Fu Manchu is a Watson, but not a Hastings.
Trowbridge was rather Scully to de Grandin's Mulder.

Though most of the belief in the 'Watson as an idiot' trope is down to the Rathbone films.
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I think it's like why Doctor Who has to have a companion: the genius character needs another character they can explain things to because they can't directly address the audience, unless it's written in the first person.

If Watson were clever then Holmes would be reduced to saying things like "as you well know, Watson, the venom of the iguana is rendered inert by heating it to three hundred degrees for twelve minutes. And as you will recall from your expert knowledge of harpsichord construction, the main spindledown connects to a small brass lever called the tintinnabulator: those brass scrapings we found in the duchess's wig were from the one found inside the dead bat on the stable roof. I see you agree with me that this proves the murderer is actually Sir Reginald, and the man calling himself Sir Reginald is actually Lady Emily's parlormaid in disguise. But I'm boring you because this was all so dreadfully obvious from the very start of the case."
 
catsmate said:
Though most of the belief in the 'Watson as an idiot' trope is down to the Rathbone films.
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I once saw an interview with Edward Hardwicke. (For anyone unfamiliar, he played Watson opposite Jeremy Brett in all but the first series of Sherlock Holmes.) He opined that the reason Nigel Bruce's Watson was made out to be such a bumbler is that Watson was supposed to represent Britain, and Holmes represented America coming to Britain's aid.

Interestingly, in the first two Rathbone films, which were made before the war, Watson is not portrayed as an idiot. These two were made by 20th Century Fox (Universal made the last 12), and were both set in the appropriate time period. The Hound of the Baskervilles is definitely worth watching, IMO. I can't really recommend The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, though, as the plot is highly non-canonical.
 
Books that are far longer than they need to be. For example I've read a novel that had a 50+ page digression that didn't develop plot or character, and wasn't referred back to later on.
 
jadebox said:
Sci-Fi novels where you have to look up every other word in a glossary.
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A couple of the early books in David Drake's Royal Cinnabar Navy series included a note that basically said no, it doesn't make sense for a society in the distant future that barely remembers Earth to use things like our modern units of measurement, but saying "the ship was traveling at a velocity of 100 flerbacks per squeen" sounds stupid, so just assume the characters are saying something exotic and futuristic that's being translated for the benefit of the reader.
 
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