Keep your readers awake!

I’ve shared a couple of posts about what makes readers give up on a book… interesting, very interesting – but also serves as a warning to writers. Make sure you (i.e. me) don’t fall into the traps which mean people stop reading you!

People gave up reading books because:

If the story pops out at me and lives before my eyes in ways that’s than the text, I’m intrigued, because I’m seeing magic, and I have to keep going.
When I can’t relate to the MC, in a recent book the characterisation was done really badly and just grated on my nerves and I couldn’t stand her personality so I stopped reading it. It was an interesting story idea from what I remember, just not delivered well.
Head hopping, when I can’t figure out who is talking – and a lot of spelling errors!
To much dialogue!
My pet peeve is when the author doesn’t get the psychological motivation of his characters right.
Too much time spent getting to the inciting incident and/or plot point one…. Boredom. If nothing happens for pages and pages except description or background, I’ll probably put it down.
When it’s predictable.
When the characters are just really unlikable or the writing is bad with characters I don’t care about, and also when I still don’t know what the story is several chapters into it,
Having alternating first person narrators, which is annoying enough, but when their “voices” are indistinguishable from each other it only draws my attention to the writers’ weaknesses.
When I keep thinking “it’s got to get less depressing soon!” but every turn of the page it’s just tragedy and sadness, I finally just decide enough is enough.
Clever writing – by “clever” I mean someone trying to artificially enhance their natural writing style. First thing my red pen strikes are words I don’t normally use…. and the reverse – the combination of bland writing and an overused premise
The character doing something out of the ordinary purely for plot development and nothing else. That’s a book deal breaker for me.