I was just wandering around the forums on Amazon and saw a thread there that was fairly entertaining to read where the OP asked "What makes you stop and put down a Sci-fi or Fantasy book and not finish reading?" That got me thinking, are there things that kill a book for most people? Some of the things I saw listed over and over...
1) Long descriptions of a characters physical attributes.
2) Spelling magic as magik or other "cool" spelling changes.
3) Creating a set of rules for your world, then breaking them because they became hard to follow.
4) The rescue type characters that exist only to fix a scene, or solve a problem and then are gone.
5) Authors wish fulfillment. Meaning if the story feels like the author is just writing about fulfilling his own wishes, that kills a story.
6) Sudden unexplained major shifts in character of the main characters.
There were some points that went back and forth. For example one group of people said "purely evil bad guys suck, they should be more gray, or have some redeeming value, same with purely good good guys" while others said "Villains should be pure evil, heroes should be pure good."
I was surprise NOT to see listed things like:
1) Bad spelling
2) Bad grammar
3) Incorrect word usage
What do you all think? What kills a book for you? Long drawn out sex scenes do it for me. I would prefer something like "they spent the night in each others arms" and then move on. The fact they have some physical relationship is often important to the story, but how they fulfill it in explicit detail never is. (unless your writing erotica of course) Also I do not like tremendous detail. Saying a "violently red wall" is sufficient, I do not need a atom by atom description of it.
On the flip side, do not leave major scenes undescribed. C.S. Lewis did that in his Narnia series, esply "Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" where you get to the epic battle at the end of the book and you only get like 1/2 sentence or something describing it.
So what do you think?
