Lurid prose always turns me off, but more frequently, the yards and yards of exposition at the beginning.
As a SSHG shipper, and one who doesn't like teenage!Hermione, most of the ficcage I'm going to read or write is going to be AU (but of course Snape's not dead, lalalala). I can accept that. It's call suspension of disbelief for criminy sake, so don't spend paragraphs telling me that Snapemiraculouslysurvivedthesnakebiteandisnowlivingahappyandfulfillinglife. Or not. But I think I'm kind of on my own on this, because the one time I did something where Snape recovers, and showed the scene, it wasn't an important part of the story, but I got slammed because everyone was like "hey! that went by too fast!" oops! :)
Just get on with the story. Or in my case the post...
Oh, and yeah - sudden shifts in characters over the space of a paragraph. I read a story once where Hermione hated (hated!) Snape and in the next chapter was swooning over him. I actually went back and read the two chapters twice over in succession to see if I'd missed anything!
This (and your thread this morning/last night?) has been really interesting. Thanks for posting.
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Lurid prose always turns me off, but more frequently, the yards and yards of exposition at the beginning.
As a SSHG shipper, and one who doesn't like teenage!Hermione, most of the ficcage I'm going to read or write is going to be AU (but of course Snape's not dead, lalalala). I can accept that. It's call suspension of disbelief for criminy sake, so don't spend paragraphs telling me that Snapemiraculouslysurvivedthesnakebiteandisnowlivingahappyandfulfillinglife. Or not. But I think I'm kind of on my own on this, because the one time I did something where Snape recovers, and showed the scene, it wasn't an important part of the story, but I got slammed because everyone was like "hey! that went by too fast!" oops! :)
Just get on with the story. Or in my case the post...
Oh, and yeah - sudden shifts in characters over the space of a paragraph. I read a story once where Hermione hated (hated!) Snape and in the next chapter was swooning over him. I actually went back and read the two chapters twice over in succession to see if I'd missed anything!
This (and your thread this morning/last night?) has been really interesting. Thanks for posting.
Now, 'scuse me while I find some coffee...
*trundles off blearily to office coffee-pot*