Reading as a Writer
As a reader, something that instantly removes me from a narrative is when the author mixes up characters' names or their physical descriptions. For example, I just finished reading a fluff piece. It was cute, but right at a critical moment in the plot, the female lead’s eyes were described as brown, when it was quite clearly stated in a St. Patrick’s related conversation at the beginning of the book that her eyes are green! I could forgive that inconsistency if not for the fact that only a few pages later she calls the guy by the wrong name! Do some of these authors create stories and characters so similar that they can’t even tell which one they’re writing about? My characters are very much my brainchildren, and I know that parents sometimes call their kids by the wrong name, my parents do it; I’ve done it with the kids I was a...