Thoughts on writing

Recently I came across an author's response to an Amazon review and I have to admit to feeling saddened by the exchange. I have removed names as this is not a personal attack, but a general comment about the use or abuse of our language. 

Here is the review: 

"This isn't a bad story but, like so many books, it is spoiled by a poor understanding of the English language. He was sat should be he was sitting, he was stood should be he was standing. Towards the end this seems to have been corrected so why let it spoil the first three quarters?

Also, every time the word 'yet' appears it is preceded by 'in' which makes no sense.

Possessive nouns and pronouns have no apostrophes and the awful word 'gotten' is used.

Hyphens keep popping up for no apparent reason!

If you can ignore the mis-use of the English language, the book is worth a read though a little slow."

And the author's response: 

"Authors these days are told not to use too many words ending with 'ing'. Such grammatical language alters through the years, but this is something which is frowned upon by editors and publishers, and has been for at least the past five years, so it is abided by at all times. I'm also a little worried having read your reviews, that you are mentioning the same things in each of them. 'The author wrote sat and used the word gotten' is written in all of your reviews on Amazon. These words are acceptable in UK English."

Who is told "not to use too many words ending with 'ing'."? If a writer overuses the continuous tense in her verbs, or peppers her work with gerunds, clearly that is poor style. Any tedious form of repetition may spoil prose. But if a writer needs to be told this, perhaps she should spend a few years reading others who do know how to write, before rushing to self-publish her own work while she still lacks a rudimentary understanding of language? 

It is true that the rules of grammar are constantly changing, but do editors and publishers frown upon the overuse of "words ending with 'ing' " any more than any other poor use of language? I don't think so - and what does "it is abided by at all times" even mean? I certainly don't abide by these dubious ideas about what is "acceptable in UK English".

The author is entitled to criticise her reviewer for repeated complaints about constructions like "He was sat" but perhaps this is a case of choosing your battles carefully. 

"He was sat" is incorrect, and in my view is not "acceptable" from someone who claims to be a writer. 

At the risk of being brought to task for repeating myself, I do think that if you want to publish or, in this instance, self-publish, your work, you have a duty to at least try to write well. For a fellow author to employ such clumsy and inaccurate constructions as "he was sat" and "he was stood" is shoddy. But to then defend such prose as "acceptable in UK English" is shocking. Acceptable to whom? Not to me, nor to several irritated reviewers of her book.  

Several very poorly edited books have famously become blockbusters. We can all probably name at least two. So should we blame writers for throwing their work out and hoping for the best? Am I an idiot to devote so much of my life to agonising over my choice of words, and my sentence structures? Does it really matter? Am I just an old-fashioned pedant to care about the quality of my published prose?

What do you think? 

Links to all my books can be found on my website http://leighrussell.co.uk 

Amazon

We read a lot of posts by books lovers criticising Amazon. Is it disingenuous of me to write a post in their defence, just when my agent has negotiated a three book deal with them for a new series I am writing? Well, perhaps you might like to read to the end of my post and then draw your own conclusions. After all, that is one of the glories of reading, that we are free to do just that, read and make up our own minds.

    We read a lot about Amazon decimating our bookshop chain, Waterstones, just as Waterstones was previously accused of destroying independent bookshops. Part of the perceived problem with Amazon was the rise of ebooks. But let's examine this. Waterstones rushed to take a share in the market for kindles. That appeared short term at the time, but turned out to be a sound business decision. 

    It may be ironic that selling kindles helped the bookshop chain to survive, but to some extent 'supping with the devil,' as some characterised it, meant that Amazon played its part in helping to save the bookshops. I am not suggesting that Amazon's motivation was anything other than commercial, but it created a virtuous circle. And that, surely, is what we are witnessing in the book world today. The truth is that the advent of ebooks and ease of purchase online have resulted in more people reading more books. That can only benefit all book sellers, and that is largely thanks to Amazon. 

    I value bookshops and libraries. It is well known that I have campaigned vigorously to support both. But I cannot see why there should be a conflict between print book and ebooks, or physical stores and online book providers. I appreciate the fact that I can buy books online wherever I am, at any time of the day or night. That does not prevent me from going into bookshops, which I frequently do, and buying books there. Amazon has not put up barricades outside bookshops. On the contrary, with more people reading, if bookshops are canny and make their spaces reader friendly, they could be selling more books than ever before, as the community of book readers and book lovers grows. 

    There has never been a better time to be a reader, or a writer or, I think, a bookseller. 

Writing Short Stories

With several bestselling novels on the shelf, I recently turned my hand to writing short stories. Well, one short story so far to be exact. You wouldn’t think writing a short story would be too tricky for someone used to writing manuscripts of nearly 100,000 words. That was certainly my expectation. Wrong! It’s hard to present a brief snapshot without being superficial or resorting to clichés and it was a sobering reminder that every form of writing demands different skills.
First of all, there's the idea. In a novel, one idea can carry your writing for six months, or even a year, but each short story needs its own new idea.
How do short story writers come up with so many ideas?
Then there's the issue of character. There wasn’t enough time to give much detail, and no space for character development (it was a very short short story), and it’s hard to be unpredictable without leaving an unresolved contradiction.
As in novels, plot was important, but I wasn’t sure how much time I could afford to spend setting the scene, and how short the final twist could be.
But the biggest surprise to me was how the style of my writing changed when I was writing a short story.
If I ever dare show my one short story to anyone, I’ll post it here. I’m not sure if I will, but one thing I am sure of is that I now have even more respect for short story writers than I had before.