The question “What bothers you, and why?” is so broad that there are probably hundreds of things that annoy me. But I choose to ignore most of them because it’s simply not helpful or healthy to stay hacked off at a bunch of annoyances. So, I’m going to focus on one thing that really gets under my skin: bad writing, especially when it sells incredibly well.

I recently read Lee Child’s Tripwire, and pretty quickly, I realized that Child is absolutely in love with the word “guy.” He’s a master of repetition, but the overuse of “guy” was mind-numbing. Don’t say “bartender”—it’s “the bartender “guy.” Don’t say “doorman”—it’s “the doorman “guy.” And why give the villains a name when you can just keep saying “the first guy” and “the second guy”?

I even found an excerpt of the book online and did a quick search for “guy.” How many times do you think it appeared in just that one section? 25? 50? 75? Try 110 times! And that’s basically just a couple of chapters. There are 58 chapters in the book, so you can do the math. It got to the point that every time “guy” came up, I said it out loud.

(Go ahead and check it out for yourself. Here’s the link to the sample. Go there and do a search for “guy” and see what you come up with. Other than words like “and,” “the,” “of,” “but,” etc., “guy” is the most common word in these two chapters.)

I’ve posed the question, “Why ‘guy’?” online, and the common answer is that Child has said he’s just being conversational and writing the way people think. Honestly, I don’t know anyone who thinks “guy” a hundred times a day, let alone an hour. To me, it’s lazy writing, and yet it consistently tops bestseller lists. Sure, his plots are often great, but his craft is, in my opinion, simply crap. It’s so bad that I stopped reading his books.

I felt a similar way about the “Left Behind” series. Eventually, all I saw was “Left Behind 98: The Grasp for More Cash.” If you’re going to take the time to write a book, at least put a little effort into it and try to write something worth reading. This is especially frustrating to me because I’ve poured my heart into writing a book that I feel like no one will ever see, and I worked extremely hard to make it special and original. Then I read something like, “Jack looked at the bouncer guy and bounced his head off of the other bouncer guy,” and I cringe in frustration and a bit of anger. And don’t even get me started on his descriptions of weapons—he’ll meticulously describe every aspect of a Sig Sauer P226, but he can’t be bothered to say anything more than “guy”? Unreal.

Yes, he sells books. But he also drains perfectly good brain cells in the process.

Copyright © 2025 Doug DeBolt.