Writer's sins

For some reason or other I began a list of my favorite fan fiction peeves. (Well, favorite is not really the right word, but let's go with that for now.) Of course I was thinking up this list while I was in the shower, which isn't the best place for taking notes.

Add your own, I'm sure you have some. ;)

1. Authors who
    a) don't bother to proofread their own work
    b) do proofread but still manage to miss at least half of their spelling/grammar errors
    c) don't bother even asking someone to beta their work, even when they know there probably are mistakes in it (and mention said mistakes in the author's note)

2. Authors who write epically long stories that are just bad. And keep doing so, never learning from experience or their own mistakes, possibly because of those twits who always comment with 'that was sooo great' no matter the actual quality of the story.
On the flipside, I admire writers who, years and some precious experiences later, come back to revise their 20k+ stories in order to make them better.

3. Chatspeak. If u r writing lk this or, gods beware, using l33t, I'll assume that
    a) you are under the age of 20
    b) probably even under the age of 16
    c) too lazy to write like a normal person
    d) have never actually read a real book (and are therefore not in the least qualified to write anything yourself)

4. Using other languages in your story. Something which really annoys me in Losers fanfics is the excessive use of Spanish. Yes, I know Cougar speaks Spanish. The thing is, I don't. That's why I'm reading an English fanfiction. Building long sentences or whole conversations into your fanfic, which are in another language than the one you are actually writing your story in, is disrupting the flow of your story and also irritating. Adding the translation in the footnotes at the end of your story/chapter does not help. There are other ways to make sure the reader knows that something is being said in another language.

5. Using foreign words without knowing what they really mean, or grossly misspelling them. (I read a fanfic a few days ago in which the author kept using the word 'katanna'. I don't know what they thought that means, but it's certainly not a Samurai sword.) Now this is something that authors in anime fandoms love to do. If you want to use some phrases that almost every anime fan knows (like arigato, who doesn't know what that means?) that's fine with me. But for heaven's sake, use the right ones! And check the spelling!

6. Retelling something that has happened from the point of view of one of the characters. Which can work, if the author knows what they are doing. Most of the time it doesn't, especially when the author does it in the 'and then this happened, and Character A thought that' style, which happens a lot more often than should be possible. Aside from being bad style it's also mind numbingly boring.


I'm sure I'll think of more, but that's it for now. As I said, add some of your own. Talk to me, people! ;-P