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Pet Peeve #20 - Not Paying Attention

by JM
pet-peeves.jpg

Last week I mentioned people not paying attention to the point of misspelling titles. In the past, I’ve also mentioned taking care in all you do when it comes to writing properly.

Along those same lines, this week’s pet peeve is about writers who don’t pay attention overall. Their blue-eyed beauty mentioned on page 17 suddenly has green eyes on page 32. Not for any magical reasoning or because her eyes change color with her mood, but because the writer forgot.

Take notes. Write your story. Reread notes. Rewrite your story. Read your notes again. With any hope, your readers are interested in what your characters are doing. If you’re lousy at keeping your blue-haired hero with blue hair, then you need to start keeping better notes.

Don’t even try to get me to read something lengthy of yours if you don’t have some sort of notes.

For those who are forgetful and/or don’t pay attention, here’s a list of the previous pet peeves. Call it a 20th Anniversary Edition.

1. That vs Who
2. Just… Just…
3. Filler Words
4. Thinking
5. And then… And then…
6. Words
7. Spelling
8. Consistency
9. Dialogue Tags Part One
10. Dialogue Tags Part Two
11. Stating the Obvious
12. Repeating Yourself
13. “Said he.”
14. Paragraph Breaks
15. Poetry Capitalization
16. Blogging for Money Discussion
17. Nausea
18. Prose or Poetry
19. The Basics


Posted in Pet Peeves on April 24th, 2007

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2 Responses to “Pet Peeve #20 - Not Paying Attention”

  1. Nicole Says:
    April 28th, 2007 at 8:48 pm

    I’m with you 100% on these. You might like this site, they have quite an extensive array of ‘em.
    http://www.peevepile.com/
    Cheers.

  2. JM Says:
    April 29th, 2007 at 6:49 pm

    Thanks, Nicole, for the link. Looks like hours of fun digging.

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