I speak, of course, of the "look at my verbal backflips" tendency in literary fiction.
What if YA were like that? By which I mean, what if YA were so impressed with the smell of its own farts (or just the sound of its own voice, you pick) that it spent hundreds and thousands of words talking about...nothing?
Even during the not-as-brief-as-it-should-have-been, Jilly-know-yourself-better-dammit period when I was trying to write semi-literary fiction myself, I found the long-winded description tedious at best.
I don't really care about all 73 shades of pink and coral and mother-of-pearl and Orange Julius tinting a sky, causing a character to reflect, boringly, on his own mortality and also his childhood. It doesn't change my understanding of the character, or the story, or the writer's ability, to slog through an entire page of an elaborately-constructed metaphor comparing two women's church hats to multi-colored, feathered Parthenons, marching bravely through time and the line at the post office atop their some-also-overly-clever-metaphor-for-hairs. And there's just never that much worth saying about how that one tree looked.
I don't want to read about those things, even when they're done well; why would I want to write them?
