What’s your biggest pet peeve that you see in first lines / paragraphs / pages?
Jackie: Physical descriptions of a character in the first paragraphs. I like to be submerged right into the world, so too much “explaining” in general in those first pages is off-putting to me.
Kathleen: Anything that reads as info dump or trying too hard to paint a picture. I want opening lines that make me want to immerse myself in a story (see post on best first lines).
Mackenzie: Too much passive voice (or general lack of an original voice) and too much telling. Let me discover for myself the characters and world you’ve created.
Danielle:
Throwing us into backstory–I like when the story starts, and we get snippets of backstory and worldbuilding as we go. Also, when the main character has a lot of questions right away, this slows me down because then I have all those same questions too, rather than allowing the questions to come to me organically.
Suzie:
So I know everyone says that writers should start in the middle of things–and this is true, but I hate when the opening starts too late. If a manuscript opens with something super emotional and there’s no lead up to it, there’s nothing to make me feel the same emotions as the characters. As a result, the drama and conflict is lost on me.
I also can’t handle a character looking into the mirror and talking to themselves as an opening.
Pete: When the character is too passive, or when there’s action but no insight into who the characters really are (and why we should care about them). In the first pages, more than anything, I need to be drawn into the character(s). Then I’ll go wherever they’re taking me.
shealwaysreads 