I'm linking up with That Artsy Reader Girl for another Top Ten Tuesday.
It's a freebie week! I've compiled a top ten list of things that book people seem to do way more than actual people do.
1. Not know they're holding their breath
"I let out the breath I didn't know I was holding." Really? You weren't breathing through that entire page and your body wasn't like, "Hello, give me some air!"?
2. Bite their lip until they taste blood
These book characters all seem to be walking around with split lips! You were so nervous/scared/whatever that you literally bit so hard you drew blood? And then the "metallic/salty/bitter taste of blood" just filled your whole mouth? Yuck.
3. Bite the inside of their cheek
Usually when I hear people talk about biting their cheeks, it's something they do accidentally while eating, but people in books do it constantly, either as a nervous tic or to keep from laughing or for some other reason.
4. Smile with half their mouth
The pages of YA romances are filled with hot guys who are apparently experiencing an epidemic of Bell's palsy or else only know how to smirk at people, because they all have the same tendency to smile with half their mouths or are described as having a "lopsided smile." Seriously, where are the guys who just have a nice, typical smile? The kind that uses both sides of their mouth??
5. Not realize that the person screaming is them
I get that our beloved book characters go through some traumatic stuff, and so maybe that explains this phenomenon, but I feel like most of the time people know if they're screaming. And yet book characters are constantly experiencing something terrifying/shocking and then hearing a scream and only belatedly realizing it's coming from their own mouth.
6. Not realize they've been speaking their thoughts aloud
Look, I talk to myself out loud all day, but trust me, I'm very aware that I'm doing it. When I worked in an office and they put the summer intern desk in my office, I would warn the intern each summer that I may think out loud while they're in there. I have yet to have an experience where I thought I was having a conversation in my head and then suddenly realized that all of those thoughts had come out of my mouth without me noticing that I was speaking. But apparently many book characters have a hard time distinguishing between silent thinking and out-loud thinking and are shocked when they realize they've been talking!
7. Respond to someone as if in answer to that person's exact thoughts
On the flip side to #6, many times someone is actually thinking their thoughts silently to themselves in their head, and then some other character responds as if they heard those thoughts out loud. I have definitely had people guess my feelings from my facial expression, and sometimes people may anticipate what I want to say in response to them, but I haven't had the experience of, say, sitting silently in a car with someone and thinking a thought and then getting a coherent, out-loud response from the other person as if they'd heard an exact sentence in my brain. In books, though? Happens all the time.
8. Zone out so long that they don't realize someone's talking to them
This is a favorite technique of amateur memoirists who don't realize that you can just give the reader backstory without having to build a whole scene where you stand there staring off into space and remembering how you got to that moment until someone waves their hand in front of your face and asks if you're listening and you "snap back to the present." I certainly get lost in my thoughts at times, but it's usually because I'm worrying about something, not reflecting in narrative detail on all of my life choices up to that point.
9. Get pregnant the first time they have sex with someone
Except for romances — where you're most likely to get sex scenes for the sake of sex scenes — if a character with a uterus has sex with someone, then I'm going to estimate 80% of the time they end up pregnant. Especially if their lover dies or leaves forever afterwards. If first-time sex resulted in pregnancy in real life as often as it does in books, there would be a lot more pregnancies!
10. Have a best friend of a different gender (and both be straight)
With almost all of the people I know in real life who have an actual platonic best friend of another gender, at least one of the people in the friendship is not attracted to their friend's gender. But with all these friends-to-lovers YA romances, you'd think it was extremely common for straight people's very best friend to be someone of another gender. Oftentimes this is explained by them being neighbors or their moms being best friends or their friendship going back to elementary school, but when I was in high school, my best friend was not someone I'd known my whole life and it definitely wasn't a guy. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm just saying it happens all the time in books!
What else would you put on this list?
Looking back:
One year ago I was reading: A Promised Land and Strangers from a Different Shore
Five years ago I was reading: Lolita, Middlesex, and Murder on the Orient Express
Ten years ago I was reading: I Am the Messenger
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