Pet Hates

If you want some "light" reading over the Jubilee weekend, it's worth spending half an hour digesting Jonathan Franzen's excellent article about autobiography in last Saturday's Guardian 

I 've only just caught up with it myself and, actually, it isn't light at all, it's chocablock with closely argued, trenchant observations, but it is bound to set you thinking about the whole business of writing, and in particular about drawing on your own experience as a source for your work, and that can only be a good thing.

The literary megastar author of The Corrections includes a list of all the things he dislikes in literature,

"My work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game-playing, overt didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on."

This made me think about my own pet hates: writing for effect (of any kind) which I suppose means writing without truth or sincerity; sensationalism, lazy plotting, anything obvious, anything gratuitous, anything too accessible, anything too inaccessible (!). The fiction I enjoy the most is like a door, ajar, waiting for your hand upon the latch and the pressure of your arm as you push it open....

 

What are your literary dislikes?