another writing pet peeve that I’m noticing more and more is, voice.
So… the words you pick, express more than just their meaning? I’ve noticed more and more in books published a kind of wooden? overly formal tone, a lot of words to impress your SAT tutor.
Particularly in first person the words you pick the way your character speaks and thinks and the words in which they do that, tell us the readers things about them. Are they smart are they good at school, bad at school, not articulate, etc you can tell me a character likes poetry without ever mentioning that they read it by how they express themselves.
and oh btw if you have two characters in dueling narrative, I should get a distinct difference between them, two different people shouldn’t be written just the same way, how they talk and think should be different.