Yanking Readers Out of a Story

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I can be a pretty annoying person to watch television or movies with.  Maybe most writers are.  Plot holes and plot devices trip me up in bad stories and I’m too analytical of what works in good stories. This may be why I don’t get a lot of invitations to hang out and watch TV with members of my family.

Regardless of my general unpopularity as a movie-watching companion, my husband and I were watching the movie Lucy on Amazon Prime last weekend.  It was, actually, a good film and one of the few genres that overlap enough so that my husband and I can both enjoy it.  But there was one part (okay, probably three parts, actually. But I won’t give spoilers) where my husband said, “But why are they doing that?  That wouldn’t happen—there would be cops all over the place.”  And I said, maybe a bit impatiently, “Because it has to happen.  For the story.”  And I quickly explained why.

Once I pointed out the strings and the puppet master, we were both watching the movie from a different perspective.

It’s those types of moments when I’m reading a book or watching TV or movies that I try to avoid as a writer. 

Here are some things that jerk me out of a story as a reader that I try to avoid as a writer:

Author intrusion: fitting in a sermon on one topic or another…sometimes political, sometimes not.

The need for too much suspension of disbelief.  Author John Scalzi calls this “the flying snowman.”

Head-hopping POVs.  Confusion can really pull us out of a story.

Too many narrators.  See confusion, above.

Plot devices. Deus ex machina.

Smart characters, foolish choices.  Characters investigating dark basements alone and unarmed when there are monsters in the neighborhood.

Breaking the fourth wall in the story.

Boring passages with no direct impact on the plot.  Melville’s chapters on harpoons.

Unnatural dialogue.

Sometimes too many filtering words. Maybe only other writers will notice this.  Deep POV can help a reader feel as if they’re in the characters’ skin.

Pace-slowing detail for objects, settings, or characters that don’t help create or reinforce the story world.

Research presented in unnatural ways in the narrative.

These are some of mine…and different ones annoy me/pull me out of a story to different degrees.  Do any of these bother you?  What would make it on your list?  And…how are you when watching TV and movies with others?

Image: Death to the Stock Photo

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