Inkblot

There are a lot of mistakes authors make when putting together a manuscript. Some are major, and require careful contemplation and a well-written report, but at least they're interesting. Others are much more minor, and easily resolved in a line edit, which makes them insidiously common. This is a small list of mistakes whose repetition has elevated them into the raw fuel that powers my nightmares.

Not putting commas around the vocative case: "I don't know(,) John"
This is so minor that it probably outcompetes the correct version in the general population, because it's easier to write and is often clarified by context. So why does it annoy me so much? Because reliance on context means that the reader is taking extra steps just to understand what on earth you're talking about. In small doses this means that they have less concentration left to understand the hopefully more interesting layers of your story; and in larger doses they'll just stop reading, because they hate it. In truth, this particular mistake is on a level with not using serial commas, except that there's no debate around its use. The situations in which you will genuinely confuse someone are rare, but this isn't about that. This is about me, not having to beat my head against a wall every time it crops up in a line edit.

Anything ‘almost’ happening, or being ‘almost as if’ it were happening
This is simply a tease. Maybe it could be a way of showing the narrator's perspective (how aware of a tenuous position they are), but more often it's a way for authors to make scenes with very little happening seem more interesting. More to the point, if you out and out tell the reader...most things, honestly...then they just won't care about them. At times this can be an issue of zoom: the author wants us to know that something almost happened, but not dive into the details of how, or why that would be significant. Meaning the solution is the same as any other issue of narrative zoom (or show don't tell, or whatever you want to call it): either do it justice or take it out. Except that the 'almost' scenario is even more toxic, because it risks getting your reader excited about a story that you didn't write.

Anything happening ‘suddenly’, ‘beginning’ to happen, or ‘starting’ to happen
Now this is just lazy writing and I shouldn't have to explain it to you. The only exception is if it's poetry and you're using every syllable of the word intentionally (just realised I may have to do a 'poetry is not just how you feel' article so that I can link to it...and I blame you). But the big question to ask yourself is: what does that Look like? Because readers don't actually care about what's happening in your book; they care about being immersed in your world.

Using your first sentence to orient the reader rather than to hook them
Now, this doesn't compare to Slow Starts, a major problem in which the reader must wade through the least interesting content first and then simply stops reading, but it's still frustrating to read story after story of "Chad Green, football player extraordinaire, strode across the field where they grew up...". OK, your story is about Chad Green, in a location, and that's all fine except it's basically a synopsis rather than a story. One of my favourite ever first lines is from Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon: 'One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill' (it's out of copyright, so go find a PDF version or something). Yes, it establishes some things straight away (it's first person, it begins at night, etc.), but 'tasted bitterness' is just bizarre enough to hook me, while 'the hill' preferences perspective over exposition. And the unfortunate truth is that the publishing industry is much harder on these mistakes than their readers, because we all lost patience with them long ago.

For that matter:
Excessive use of a character's name in text (especially their full name)
Whose perspective are we in? Most characters would only rarely refer to themselves by their given name unless making introductions, and yet this happens consistently in unedited manuscripts. More to the point, real people (who we're trying to imitate) tend to think, and even speak, in associations more than the actual names of the people around them. This is shown surprisingly effectively in Gargoyles, the animated children's show from the 90s, where the characters are nameless until they integrate with modern customs. When asked what they would call each other, the gargoyles respond 'friend' and use the nearby river as an example: with only one in the area, why would it need any name other than 'the river'? Arguably, this is then about zoom. As an author, you may be juggling a number of characters in your head at once, but anything written that way will feel like a set of stage directions. And stage directions are boring to read.

In Conclusion
If you're going to write anything short of mind-blowing, at least try to come up with new and exciting mistakes all of your own. I'll still hate them, but it'll be the fresh, quizzical type of hate that makes me want to keep reading and tell all the other editors about it afterwards.