One of the best ways to win your readers is by not annoying them in the first place. There are some potential bloopers that writers make that cause their readers to abandon their books and turn away from their stories.
Without ado, let us jump into the list of things that you might do to annoy your ideal readers.
Not Sticking to the Genre
You will absolutely annoy your readers if you fail to stick to the genre and include the elements of your chosen genre. Apart from genre elements, we also refer to any storytelling elements that are linked with the chosen genre.
For instance, if you choose a sci-fi genre, there will be certain elements, such as a spaceship, time travel, aliens, etc. You might as well include the aspect of having a cure for previously incurable diseases. On that note, if you are writing sci-fi, you might check out these science fiction editors, who will help you polish your book before it gets in front of your readers.
On the same note, if you are writing a thriller, then your readers will expect thrilling elements, such as car chases or being hunted down by an assassin. Today, many writers like to combine different genres and mix them together to get something innovative and original which can work, too.
The thing is that even though you might be combining different genres, you still need to establish early on what you will be working on within the story. Now, if you fail to do that and you are mixing a few different genres, your readers won’t connect with the element of your story.
Not Sticking to Pacing
Another thing that readers find annoying is inconsistent pacing. What we mean by pacing is the speed at which a story is told. The focus here is on the word “told.” The thing is that you can tell a story that takes place over the course of many years at a fast pace. Similarly, you can tell a story that takes place over the course of half an hour at a slower pace.
It all comes down to what you want to do with your story – but you should keep in mind that typically, readers expect a story to move along faster as the story unfolds on the pages. On that note, it is absolutely fine if you are moving at a slow pace at the beginning of the story. The reason is that your readers expect the story to be slow in the beginning because you have to establish characters, scenarios, settings, etc.
Understand Reader’s Expectations
As you move forward with the story, your readers expect you to pick up speed as you move forward. More importantly, keep in mind that if you have had a fast starting, and then all of a sudden, your story grinds to a halt in the middle, where it remains slow until the end, where things start to go at a high pace again – your readers will have a problem with it.
As a matter of fact, your audience won’t even bother to get to the ending because they will feel so bored by the slow middle of your story. So, keep in mind that the pacing of your story is a balancing act. So, you don’t want to overdo it, and you also don’t want to make things go super-fast.
You need to be strategic with the cool-down periods, and you need those sections where your readers can breathe. Simultaneously, you don’t want to promise your audience something upfront with the story being fast-paced right off the bat, and then nothing happens for the rest of the story until the very end.
Pulling Punches
Your readers will not like to read your story further if you make the mistake of pulling punches. What this means is that you might have a character who can be the villain, and they have an opportunity to harm someone. The character has the desire to harm someone, and they fully intend to harm someone – but for some silly reason that only you can possibly come up with in your story – they fail to do so.
Maybe you made them slip over something, or it started to hail all of a sudden, and their bad intentions couldn’t be fulfilled. Now, as a result of whatever happened, the hero escaped from the villain. Now, as a writer, you should know that your readers will absolutely hate it if you are pulling punches like this.
The reason why they will hate it is because by doing so, you will be breaking the reality of the story. For instance, if you are writing a thriller novel and from the early onset, you have established the villain to be an expert sniper. All of a sudden, the villain encounters the hero, and despite being an expert sniper, you make the villain fail to cause harm to the hero.
If the villain fails to fire their shot, it not only makes the villain look stupid but it will also make the hero look weak.
Recapping Scenes Unnecessarily
Readers don’t like to put up with unnecessary recaps that they might have already seen. For instance, early on in your story, an event happens, and the readers experience the event from the viewpoint of a character. The readers experience that event, get all the details they need, and move on with the story.
Now, you might make the mistake of giving your readers an extremely detailed recap of that same scene sometime later in the middle of your book. It could be in the form of that extremely detailed conversation that two characters have about that event that the readers already experienced earlier.
Sometimes, writers make the mistake of having a detailed conversation about the event in an entire chapter, which is completely unnecessary. Usually, writers use these unnecessary caps to fill the space in the story. The best thing you can do is to actually do the hard work and come up with exciting hooks to move the story forward.
