though part of that issue is that people don't go full on and just put down shit like the tall man which tells me nothing about this character but BLOODCRUSH THE STAR EATER does tell me things about this character Like how he eats fucking stars and possibly destroys worlds. The question is "how do you do that in not a fantasy or sci-fi setting" however. The answer is still likely "Get on actual character traits besides height or race god dammit".
And then there's Brandon Sanderson, writing a series in first-person with a protagonist who speaks in the WORST metaphors he could come up with. Like "A brick made of porridge." :::PPP
a brick made of porridge sounds like something that dagda would say or at the very least be happy about before eating
(Another Reckoners metaphor: "They looked so dangerous, like alligators. Really fast alligators wearing black. Ninja alligators.") Hair color epithets are the worst. YOI Badfic Friend ran into one a while back that used "the raven" to refer to someone with black hair; we decided he'd literally turned into a bird.
(...of course, I say that, and then I go to work on a fanfic I'm writing where the viewpoint character spends most of the story referring to the rest of the cast as things like "the black-haired soldier," but in my defense this is because he doesn't remember their names.)
Metaphors are cool; metaphors in every single sentence are just confusing, and alliteration rapidly gets irritating if overused. "Members of the timbered community" is really, really overwrought for some steps that are of no consequence at all in the story; it could work for, say, buildings or trees in a location that is important enough to need to be vividly described. Problem with slopping on the purple prose for everything is the same as the problem with EMPHASISING EVERYTHING! Eventually the reader stops reacting and is bored by the time you get to something which is actually important.
I remember "the bluenette", used for a male character. (i confess to having characters who refer to other exclusively in epiphets, mostly descriptors, and one of them simply can't be assed to learn the actual names.) eta: i thought 'members of the timbered community' was hilarious, and i got a character or two who speak like that, but they're also loopy. and not always the narrator.
I think it puts points in the "bad writer" column that at least one of us can't tell what's going on in the original author's version. I don't see anything in the example passage that indicates that the stairs are actually giving out from underneath the narrator- just that they were there yesterday and they're on the ground now.
I thought it was hilarious too, but I don't think the author thought it was, and that's the problem. Oh, oh! I found a published writer who comes up with even sillier plot contrivances than your average marriage law fanfic, and now I want to see these in fics! TW for ableism on the author's part: It's making me think of Carlton Mellick III who deliberately writes ridiculously off-the-wall shit.
I was mostly trying to illustrate how much easier it is to pad by going into more detail than by cramming more fancy language in, but yeah, that too. (Though it is possible the summary is wrong, since all we have is that one quote and not the whole context.)
My Handmaid does this for a variety of reasons, and exceptionally bland epithets at that. One, is that she meets so many people over the time jumps, most of whom just end up dead that there's really no point in it. Two, it just makes the job more depressing than it really needs to be. This is our fucking 9 to 5 we're not getting paid for for all eternity. No point in getting weepy over whoever the fuck. At most you are The Tall Man In Yellow and you will fucking deal with it. This I think is fine. It's a matter of whys and what you do with it. You're going to piss off someone or other with how you write anyway so may as well say fuck it and do what you like.
also i again must moan about the lack of poetry fic like there's definitely stuff out there but there just ain't enough of it darnit At least I can find that poetry prose stuff that some people find irritating as fuck? Which I'm not sure how to describe. Something like this fucking thing I wrote, I guess? It's not a terribly good example of it but it's a sort of thing I like a lot. A sort of prose that's very, very concerned with repetition, alliteration, and other things that are used to greater degrees in certain poetry styles. These make for very fun pieces I feel, especially when they're mostly just mood and tone based things. Well that and a joy of saying it. Even if I can't entirely comprehend what's being written in terms of what is happening when, if I can feel the mood and I can get this lovely feel in my mouth when I say the words I'm in love.
... protip, if your summary reads like it was written by a neural network, and does not specifically advertise your story as having been written by a neural network, I am probably not going to read further. (this is probably mean, but this example was pretty egregious. Punctuation, people! Use it!)
Coming from the other direction: if your story was written by a neural network, please advertise that fact prominently so I'll know to read it.
