My Smirk-o-Meter has Topped Out.

 If you follow my reviews here, or on Goodreads, or on Netgalley (that's me all over the place,) you'll know that I'm greatly peeved, irked, annoyed, and flabbergasted by current books having their characters all react in the same ways to everything that happens to them. I thought novelists tried to be different than each other, but I keep reading the same shortcuts to characters' emotions. 

I just read The House of Salt and Sorrows. By page 17 the characters had already smirked, bit their lips, and rolled their eyes. I burst out laughing at the second smirk. Since a funeral had taken place and the family was in mourning, laughter probably wasn't what the author aimed for. 

I swear, in most modern books, somebody will eventually bite their lip until it bleeds. Why? Nobody really does this unless they get hit with a baseball in their mouth or fall on their face. It hurts! So why does every book have someone biting their lip until it bleeds? Everybody is copying everybody else.

In one book I read (Long Way to a Small Angry Planet) three different characters smirked on one page. That's three smirks in 250 words!

Here's the words that are overused instead of showing real emotions.  Smirked. Rolled her/his eyes. Balled their fists. Bit her/his lips. Bite lips until they bled. 

Coming up fast in being overused in every book is:  He rubbed his thumb along her jawline. (My God, that's been in all the most recent books I've read.) "Words, words, words," she hissed.  And now writers are using sneered to mean someone said something, as in "I hate you," she sneered. But, sneer is a curl of the lip. Anyway, sneer is growing as a way of saying someone said something angrily. Why not say, "I hate you," she said as she poured a bottle of India ink down his favorite white Colonel Sanders' suit."

Recently I read Klara and the Sun by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Kazua Ishiguro. The story is full of teenagers but there is no eyeball rolling, no smirking, no hissing, no lip biting, no balling of fists. It was refreshing. 

There is a reason some writers win the Nobel Prize for Literature while most of us don't.

I'm begging people to think when they're writing and not use the same thing everybody's using.  Maybe if I read one book a year I wouldn't notice this. But, I read about 100 books a year and my smirk-o-meter needs oiling from all the overwork.