Book Character Pet Peeves Your Readers Will Hate 

Your characters are important to your story, you could even say you wouldn't have a story without them 

But have you ever read a story and not been able to stand one of the characters? Sometimes this is on purpose… sometimes not, but sometimes it's because they are the type of characters your readers just don't like.

Here are a few of the biggest pet peeves that can bother your reader when it comes to your male or female characters. 

(These can be interchangeable to male or female characters, as well as apply to trans and nonbinary characters as well.)

Female Character Pet Peeves 

• Is it a relationship or a charity?

The sweet shy girl in the high school class is attractive to the big bad senior who rides to school dressed in leather and attitude. Her only attraction to him is that she can fix him and make him a respectable student.

No. She's not a charity or a therapist and their relationship should not be built around her changing his personality. It should be her seeing the other personality behind this if this is the trope you want to write.

• She's perfect but doesn't think she is 

If a female character is written as being perfect, but only puts down her appearance this can get old fast. There's a lack of confidence and general body dysmorphia that can exist in your character, but if she can't look in a mirror or have a conversation about her looks without completely trashing herself while being described as being perfect, your character will come off as vain and fishing for compliments instead of genuinely believing they have a poor appearance. 

• Doormat 

Do you know that cliche where women can't decide what they want for dinner? Well, this character can't decide on anything and spends the whole book just going with the flow and doing anything without any opinion on it. Your main character should be anything but passive in their own story.

• Not like other girls 

All the other girls are playing with makeup, but she would rather play video games. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not a defining personality trait. Girls can like both, being different from all the other girls simply for liking different things is a human trait, not a personality. Don't make it part of your characters. 

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Male Character Pet Peeves 

• What a hot jerk 

He's hot, but he's a jerk to everybody and otherwise has no real redeemable qualities that have your reader wanting to like them. There's a difference between a confident character and an arrogant character. He can be a bad guy, but there has to be something redeemable about him for your reader to justify why he is bad. 

• Table Smashing Angry 

Just because he's a man, doesn't mean he has to Hulk-smash his way through everything when he's angry. Where they just in a fight over dinner and he starts smashing plates and throwing things around the room? 

This isn't saying that he has emotions and isn't afraid to show them. This is a scare tactic and a form of emotional abuse. 

He can be manly and emotional, but making your other character witness a violent tantrum that put them in harm's way isn't the way to do it.

• That's not for men 

Does he only watch football, thinks sitcoms are trashy, and won't watch any movie that may be deemed a chick flick? The male character needs to be something more than just the big bulky dude that lives and breaths all aspects of 'men'. Some men like sitcoms, some men read romance novels, and some men believe in skincare. If the male character is just a list of 101 stereotypes about men then there's something wrong there.

Male characters have dreams, desires, and goals. Yes, he wants to win the State Championship Football game, but it's because he wants to go to college for more opportunities than his small town provides. 

• Comic Relief 

Using a character as comic relief is one thing, but having the character be the stereotypical dorky dude with braces, glasses, or obsessed with comic books is overdone. These characters deserve a personality much like your main character.  

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These traits may not bother all of your readers, but they are still things to try to avoid in your story to give your characters their best fighting chance when it comes to your reader growing attached to them. 

Keep writing.

With love, 

B.K. xo

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