What kind of prose/descriptions turn you off?

[akitsukino]

Would you rather the prose in the books you read give you enough description to really make you feel and see the environment and world it's making for you, or would you rather it do just enough to get you through the story? I personally feel a little jipped when the description and writing are a little too barebones. It feels like I'm being cheated out of a grander version of the story I'm being told. But what do you guys think?

[ar-ninetysix]

Purple prose, is a bit of a turn-off for me. That idea of "So like.. you need the pretty imagery to hide the fact the story's not so great?" is an immediate thought in my head when I read that style. It's a bit weird, but I feel like if the story's enough, it should keep me well invested. And that's not to say vivid descriptions are unacceptable, but yeah. I prefer just enough to get by. There's immersing a reader and then there's shoving too much information in their face. That's just me though

[SleepingPoppy]

I just expect a writer to convey what's important. They should consider the hierarchy of information, and use details as and where necessary to tell the best version of the story. In one story the grandeur of a castle is important. Maybe the writer is conveying how small the lead feels, and spending extra time setting up the location enhances this. But in another story the castle might be brief and relatively incidental, and yet if the writer spends extra time writing fluff about the gold here and the windows there when it doesn't much matter, I will start skipping ahead or stop reading.

So I guess I would define what I like as a sense of balance.

[ratique]

I don't enjoy non-story related content coming first like "Updates every Wednesday!", but am ok with it after the description.

Another turnoff are too long or too short descriptions. I am trying to decide if I want to read your story, give me the most necessary info to do so!

[Zaboem]

My brother found a description in a Jack Reacher novel which was so bad, he will no longer touch any books in that series.

It was as nondescript as the most nondescript thing you could imagine.

I think it's just a throw-away line created to punch up a word count and doesn't matter, but I understand why my brother took offense.

[chocolatteboss]

When people explain what the characters are wearing too much. or when writers explain the process of a character getting ready for too long. I really don't care. A few lines may be enough to draw an image of the character's outer appearance in our mind. we don't need all the details.

[kip]

first person stories are my personal biggest turn off. they can be great, they just often aren't.
also present tense which feels weirdly unnatural to me.
otherwise im pretty much okay with anything from "purple prose" to barebones and even screenwriting as long as the writer pulls it off well :>

oh, and, this isn't necessarily a writing style but people that start off with like an intro of the characters by name and then just, details?
like..
[name], [age], [general backstory]
if you can't work that into your story, i mean... the biggest part of the charm in reading a new book is getting to know the characters with the story.. im not gonna care about them just reading about them coldly like that with no context?

[MrSpuds]

Using real world units to describe everything. Most people can't relate to what 9.4cm looks like or that something is 1200 feet long with a 30 degree bend. If possible, use relationships to real world tangible things that people are familiar with to compare, like "it's half the length of their forearm" or "it weighs more than my obese grandmother" and stuff like that. I can't think of a scenario where precise measurements really help with imagery. Maybe there is one but I don't know it.

[soyasholm]

When using a really long time explaining the scenery I very quickly get bored and might drop reading the rest of the story because my attention span is so shitty for stuff like that.
Like I get you want to make the reader understand how everything looks but I really don't care if a door is carved in this and this wood and has a pattern that travels all the way over and goes in this and this way and (insert 2000000 more words for describing) and it has no importance to the plot, JUST GO THROUGH THE DOOR.

[Zaboem]

I m going to play dissenting opinion of the consensus here. I enjoy purple prose. A rich descriptive paragraph is fun, and the more over-the-top, the more I like it. Romeo could have said, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day..." or he could a have said, "Eh, you look aight, girl" and gotten back to his sword fighting.

Here is what makes me turn away from a perspective read: total length. A friend recently tried to get me involved a specific webnovel that liked. He warned me that it doesn't really get good for the first chapters. I did a little digging. It's half a million words long. It's not finished. It's book one of a series. No degree of good pacing is going to salvage this. Nope, I have many, many other things I could be reading in the same amount of time that I would needing to commit to this one story.

[Luminosophy]

I don't think it's inherently bad, just another tool you gotta learn how to handle properly. I dunno if this counts for an example but I know I've read novice fanfics and they had /every/ sentence overloaded with too many adjectives. It wasn't even that it was slowing the pace of the story, just that it had a "It was a dark and stormy night" tone no matter what was happening, and it got cringey at points, even when it was supposed to be tense. Kinda like this:

McDude's long silver flowing locks cradled McDying's teary face. Extending his hand for his ruby red scarf, he elegantly grasped the delicate cloth around his fingers, reaching it to McDying's eye level. "This was Cashmere, you asshole." He whispered gently, sobbing tears that anime sparkled in the gentle breeze, graciously offered by the quiet farts of trees surrounding them. Perhaps they too, felt offended by McDying's egregious disregard for the finer materials a man might need to design his life around.

This is the time where I only really find it off-putting. xD;;

[vfinnigan]

That's the most hilarious example of purple prose run amok I've ever read!

[vfinnigan]

Flowery prose is like planting an introduced species in your garden. If it does well, you have to take care that it doesn't completely take over and kill everything else.

As long as you keep the descriptions efficient, effective, and most importantly to the point, I'm not going to find an adjective here or there too annoying. What bothers me is telling readers how you want them to feel instead of focusing on what the character's experiencing, which should be enough to evoke a reader's sympathies.

Overuse of words or phrases pulls me out of the story. Misuse of words in a published and presumably edited or at least beta read work is like pulling me out of the story and dousing my eyes in pepper spray. One example is "hone in" instead of "home in" meaning to focus.

[bear1]

I hate it when there is too much description but nothing interested is described. It makes me feel like the author is padding out his story from a 150 page novel to 500 pages.

Lengthy description in general aren’t necessary a bad thing tho. In Walter Moers’ novel ‘the city of dreaming books’ there was a huuuuuge amount if description of the enviorment and characters. But his world is amazing and he had such a wonderful imagination and writing style that I easily could go through several pages of description how the city and its folks look like without getting bored.

However, a while ago I read one of the special adventures/books of the ‘Warriors’ series (I think the one in which Firestar had to find the Cloudclan?) and it felt like I was reading the same page over and over again. The descriptions were long, boring and flat. I eventually gave up on that book before reaching the half way point. and I really enjoy the ‘Warriors’ series itself. But that one was just....off <,<

To make it short, I think lenghtly descriptions are great if there is something to describe. If there is nothing but endless fields and hills and nothing but grass....sum it up as such but don’t describe every leaf of grass just to reach your minimum word count xD

[ratscout]

I'm of the opinion that there's no reason why a description can't be beautiful, but still efficient. Sometimes you need a little bit longer of a description of things to clue the reader into things that are important. Describing an ornate room with fancily embroidered and colorful rugs might be important if the writer is trying to give the reader important information about a character if that character happens to be rich, for example. Oooo. You can even add a few more details to a room by that by adding the fact that there are no pictures of any friends or family members, too! This lets the reader know without a single word of clumsy dialogue that the person who the room belongs to has a lot of money, but few friends~!

But then there are things that are simply unnecessary to describe that get described to death. My sisters tried reading Dune, for example, but apparently ended up not liking the book so much because of a scene in which the characters are digging something out of the sand that took up... Pages? I think they said. I can see why they got put off if that's true. LOL.

[joannekwan]

I don't mind purple prose if it's one medium sized paragraph every 10 pages or so, but generally I want enough info to have a basis for what I'm imagining while reading.

But one thing that really turns me off is:

'Orbs' used as a synonym for 'eyes'.

I never noticed until someone pointed it out in one of those bad writing articles, but now every time it pops up I can't unsee it with my dark honey orbs.

[charliesackett]

There's a sweet spot for sure. I think it's more important in settings that aren't commonplace, like if you're describing a magician's observatory full of mystical bullshit or an alien spaceship with technology the reader has never dreamed of. It's less important if you're describing a bus, because most people can imagine a bus and fill in the blanks.

I really like the way Douglas Adams describes things, like his description of demolition spaceships is "they were square, yellow, and floated in the air in the exact way that bricks don't."
Or similarly I like David Wong's description of a car driving off, "it farted out a blue cloud of dinosaur souls".
I like descriptions that make me stop and go wait, what? XD

[AllynCrowe]

I don't mind prose, as long as it has proper pacing.
Even a bit of a narrative I don't mind, as long as it's done to speed up the process and set the world without getting overdone and taking the speed out of things.

The worst prose to me, is unnecessary use of synonyms and cliches. Orbs instead of eyes is a good one, but also using words that are out of place, or not suited for the style of writing. (Modern descriptors in a 1800s setting, thesauri in tween novels, etc.)

[MariMontoya]

She doesn't think she's pretty....buuuut....clearly by the description as she stares into the mirror and the author describes what she's wearing and how it accentuates her body and her eyes, by god, her eyes!! They just hold the whole world in them! Pale skin, brown/blonde hair, dark or light eyes, slender figure, generic description for female MCs. On occasion there's the "fiery red" hair
I don't mind long descriptions depending on the genre that they're in or the time period they're written in. It creates an accurate picture of what the author likes the readers to see and makes it relatable to me as someone who isn't living in that world or that time period.