The good, the bad, and the ugly.

I am sitting in the dentist’s chair … Hey, do keep up. Scroll back to my last blog!
This time I happen to be musing on how crowded the Internet has become with review sites. It is littered … except, littered is the wrong word, conveying only a derogatory message. Festooned or adorned would be better. Review sites set up by the bravest of people who love books and take it upon themselves to review them.
Ebooks now number in their millions; some good, some great and some, positively dire. They may be free from spelling mistakes, thanks to spell checker, but they lack even a basic knowledge of sentence and plot construction.
Whoever it was that said, everyone has a book inside them, should have been shot at dawn. Everyone may well have a book inside them but that doesn’t mean they can write it.One simple reason – for the majority writing is a learned craft, just like tap dancing and becoming an astronaut.
And it’s bloody hard work! No, not the writing. Everything else. One agent states on her website, “If you haven’t spent as long editing as you have writing, don’t bother to submit your manuscript.” Another agent accepts or rejects a book on the first page. (No margin for error there.)
Agents have it easy. They only have to read three chapters before needing to lie down in a darkened room. But reviewers, they are supposed to plough through the whole thing.
How do they do it? A bad synopsis has me reeling and in desperate need of a gin and tonic. I have been known to read an entire chapter of a bad book but to go further … I promise I have tried; dozens and dozens of times. But these guys … on they go … page after page after page … all 400 of them. Scott of the Antarctic has nothing on them. Stoically they wade through thigh-high drivel, flounder through chest-deep meanderings, and into trite, meaningless and banal conversation.They have to be the toughest, bravest, most long suffering people in the world.

My advice to all would-be writers is ... If you can’t afford a decent course, there’s a great book, How to Write a Blockbuster by Helen Corner and Lee Weatherly. Or read children’s books. When I teach creative writing, I often suggest picking at random twelve novels from the shelves in the library, reading the first couple of chapters of each one – to see how it is done.  Writers of children’s books are masters. They have to be. One dull page and you lose your reader. So, Philip Pullman for sentence construction; Louis Sacher for economic prose and story-telling; Anthony Horowitz for planning … among many I could name.
Yep! Reviewers are superheros all right. Clutching a large brandy, they plough through verbose synopsis after verbose synopsis, no doubt muttering: “It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done …”By the time they reach the end of the book, they definitely deserve their rest when they get it (apologies to Mr Dickens).