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Oh, look. An opportunity for more filler text. How wonderful. I will write now about dead bunnies. Yes, dead bunnies. How I like to lick their tasty, salty fur, oh yes. Do YOU like dead to lick bunnies, Mr. Invisible Text Reading Man? Because I do. Oh, how I do like to lick dead salty bunnies. Oh, yeah, and Jhonen-- sorry about stealing your pictures. Well... no, I'm not, really, because everybody knows who drew it anyway, so it's not like I'm saying, "HEY LOOK! I CAN DRAW LIKE JHONEN VASQUEZ!" Cuz I can't.

2. Sexploitation: Fanfic fallacy. A) Character A sees Character B in naked and is consumed with lust. B) Character A is put in some kind of bizarre, contrived position that reveals his/her sex appeal to Character B (Example: Massages that get out of hand, hot tubs in every anime that exists).

3. Yoda: The character who knows too friggin' much. Assocated with the Spoonfeeding syndrome.

4. Malicious Wounding: Associated with Sexploitation. The plot device where Character A is mortally injured or angsting out, thus revealing his/her mortality and innate human frailty to Character B. Comes complete with Warm Fuzzies. This device relies on weakness on the part of one of the characters, and often seems forced or condescending.

5. Warm Fuzzies: A section that is entirely meant to make the reader go, "Aaaaaaw." Often full of melodramatic, *gasp* "I/He/She suddenly realized..." language. (Fun fact: Nobody ever "suddenly realizes" shit. If I have to use this, I need to plant the seed of this though much sooner than the sentence that requires my character to "suddenly realize." I should avoid it altogether, but I don't, 'cuz I suck).

6. Needless Character Death: Make a character as likeable as humanly possible. Then kill him/her off for a cheap tear. Death should be reserved for the two-sentence characters and when it really is necessary to make the point (i.e., a plot should never be resolved by a difficult character dropping dead. It's just lame).

7. Whiny Teenaged Angst: Adolescents contemplate suicide and cry and break things when they're upset. Adults brood and consider their options and maybe engage in property damage. And, thanks to societal brainwashing, men don't sob like fourteen year old girls-- ever. (Well-- it does happen in real life, usually when I'm in the room [sigh; I really hate weepy... anyone, really. Don't people have any pride?], but it doesn't happen often in books).

8. Plot Device Hell: Magical books, magical stones, the character is crazy/asleep/a god, SOUL-FRICKN-MATES, "oopsie, I killed the wrong guy...." All the ways that lazy writers (me) explain the world that we've created, and the reason why the characters are the way they are (angsty pasts) that have absolutely no logical basis, and are not explained past the paragraph. (Example: "Oh, lemme just fiddle with this ancient, mystical, mysteriously unguarded artifact. Wow, I just landed somewhere with dragons and purple grass. Where the fuck am I?")

9. Antirealism: So, your characters are magical. They don't need to bathe. They never have periods. Their eyevision is 20/20. If sex is involved, well, there's only a 30% chance the chick is gonna get knocked up. Eating? Sleeping? What's that? C'mon, if you're pulling that plot device where Normal Punter A is dropped into Bizarroland, explain how she/he/it gets by in a world without all our amenities.

10. Villain Cliches: VC A: "I lost my mommy/daddy, this makes me a psycho."
VC B: "I like power. I was reading The Prince in my cradle. Voila, insta-psycho!"
VC C: "I did too many drugs." Or, "I was mutated or otherwise monkeyed with to make me a psycho."
Give your villains some love. They came out of the same environment as your heroes, more or less. So take the same amount of care with their psychology.

Insta-Rebuttal Lynne steps in: "But," I-R-L says, "what about Dilandau and Ticktock and all those other really well-done 'I was monkeyed with' villians?" Okay-- backstory to villains, good. Having villains be defined by nothing but backstory, bad.

11. Hero Cliches: HC A: "I'm just that kinda guy."
HC B: "REVENGE!" (Revenge is a great motivation, but that's a whole internal reactor you're working with. Don't make him/her a completely sweet individual who goes Hyde whenever the revenge thing comes up).
HC C: "To save my beloved." Etc.
You're going to be dealing with your heroes for about four hundred double-spaced pages. Give them lots of reasons, or give them no reason at all and make them completely fucked up and confused. Whatever. Don't leave them paper flat.

12. TROOOOO WUV: Love is the point, yes. We are all scrambling around this ball of mud, completely convinced that our soul mate (ooops, Plot Device Hell) is out there, waiting for our magic touch. So we wanna live through our characters. We want them to hook up, love each other, yay! Fine. Cool. Do it right.

JUST SAY NO TO:
Telepathy
Soul mates through one of these devices: prior lives, a tarot card reading, and other "mystical" means. Love is a helluva lot of work. Make it believable. Make them fight for it.
Love through sex.

Slap to the Head Fanfiction Reviews has their own take on Trooo Wuv: The Healing Cock! The way it works is (and I know this will sound familiar to you): Male Character A comes across Female (or Male) Character B, who is Maliciously Wounded in some way. MCA then takes it upon himself to soothe and heal F/MCB-- and there's always that sentence that reads something like-- "And then the cocoon of soothing comfort shifted and became something more." Ugh. Avoid at all costs. Kill your characters before doing this to them.

And on the other side of the fence, Squeamishness. I really like Robin McKinley. I like the way she describes emotions physically instead of relying on, "She was nervous." But McKinley has one problem: in each of her books, the heroine finds herself in love, but, there is NO lead-up to speak of. This is jarring because McKinley spends so much time in these women's bodies. The lack of any emotional description of love makes the romance seem to come out of left field. So if you want to write love/sex, give the reader something... just watch out that you don't end up writing pure pr0n into the middle of the novel.

13. Pseudo-Biblical Dialogue: Oh God, spare me this. P-B D is what happens when a writer is trying too hard to make her characters sound "mysterious," "aloof," or "distant." It features no contractions and bizarre, convoluted sentence structures. It's hallmark is a definite sensation of forcedness. Nobody talks like this. Get over it and write better dialogue.