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1. Really Long Fighting Scenes
I don't know if this is just because I'm really not much of a violence person or what, but when several pages are committed to straight out fighting, I often get lost or start skimming. The way that fighting is described in books often ends up very jumbled up and makes little sense to me once I get through an entire scene.
2. A Switch in Perspective Right After a Cliffhanger
When books are in split perspectives, it really bugs me when one perspective ends in a cliffhanger, and then all of a sudden they switch to a different person who has nothing to do with the last chapter. This is something that really make me want to jump pages to find out what happened, and annoys me in general.
3. Long Speeches
This is hard to have an example for. I don't like unnecessarily long dialogue from characters. It's annoying, and sometimes I will unconsciously skip lines because I want to get one with the story.
4. A Long Stretch without Dialogue or Interesting Action
This is very vague example. If a story has several pages or a chapter that have very little or no action or dialogue, and it seems like it has nothing to do with the story, I really want to skip it.
What do you think? Do you have any other examples of things that make you want to skip pages?
I have to agree with you. I actually like action in my books, but a lot of authors get bogged down while writing a fighting scene and try and get too technical about whose arm went where. Eventually I just get lost and bored and skim.
ReplyDeleteI hate that switch in perspective trick - there have actually been a couple of books where I skipped ahead to get to the character I wanted to read about, but that never really works since I end up having to go back and start over.
Those gaps with no dialogue or interesting action tend to be background info or just description - in fantasy novels I think they have a place because you need to understand how the world works - after all we don't want to get our elves mixed up with our goblins. But sometimes it goes too far or it is misplaced.
I haven't read anything in a long time that had a long speech in it, but I'm pretty sure I would end up skimming it, speeches tend to get preachy.
I agree. In Daughter of Smoke and Bone I wanted to skip pages because it was just sooooo much description.
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