Books and Reviews

You may have rightly assumed or presumed from my first post, that one of my favourite pastimes now that I have a lot of time on my hands is reading.

 Sadly, I have become more and more concerned with the standard of writing by General Fiction Writers / Authors, not only with the language used but also with what seems to me to be a standardisation of storyline and plots.

I was reading a series of detective stories by one author, and I came across a fair number of, shall we say, unusual words, a few are given for your edification – Vernal, drugget, catechesis, pietà, hobyah, pietistic, golem, propitadingly, gallants, narthex, baldachin, nairatmiya, hauter, peripatetic, diapason, peristaltic, want some more? noli me tangere, phantasmagoria, carrels, deuil blanc, sturm und drang, jessamine, necropolis, pilaster, hecatombe, triptych, lepidopterist. I must admit, these words took me by suprise, a pleasant suprise, I am not sure but they are not the normal fare that one comes across in British detective stories but they certainly got ‘my little grey cells’ working hard. That is not the language that I have concerns with, it is the use of so called ‘blue’ or ‘foul’ language that woorries me. The writers / authors all seem to use the standard phrase, ‘it reflects modern life’, does it? Maybe it is the circle that I move in or the age group that I am part of but I cannot agree with them. Although I, along with my peers, understand the words and the context within which they are being used but do not believe that they educate or improve the minds of the younger generations, there are far more expressive words that can and should be used. To my simple mind, simplicity is not always best, it could be that making people reach for a dictionnary or a thesarus wouuld be an asset and make their reading more entertaining and educational.

Do modern publishing editors have stock list of characters and storylines that ‘sell well’ and must be followed at all costs because ‘profit’ is the key word?

Writing is easy

All you have to do is

Cross out the wrong word

Mark Twain

Books and reviews,

not a bad title, all I have to do is convince others that I know what I am talking about –

Back in my school days we were ‘encouraged’ to read and study as many different genres as we could. So, I did battle with Tolstoy, Aristotle, Homer, and others of the similar reputation (not the originals but English translations) and lost! Shakespeare was also one of our ‘you must also include this great writer in your studies’, they are all good for your mind and essential to your understanding of the English Language in all its glory, we were told.

The ones that held my imagination most, are writers / authors like Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Austen, the Bronte sisters. To me they were the ones who could paint pictures with words as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Greig, Elgar, do with music.

In my years of retirement, I have turned my hand to, and I emphasise the following words, trying to write, short stories, novels, and the like. No, nothing published yet, a short story is complete, and the Prologue and two chapters of another story in the Fantasy genre and I have completed 27 Chapters of what I think will be a novel concerning friendship, trust, and the struggles of senior citizens in ‘normal life’ if such a thing truly exists.

Will I be critiquing my own writing – no – I will leave that to others, should I ever find them published or even submitted to a publisher. What I will be doing is writing simple, honest, open reviews of the work of other writers / authors but first I must be clear in my own mind as to the difference between a writer and an author.

A quick search on a Search Engine and it gave me the following:

a)

An author is someone whose written work has been published. In addition to producing published work, people who write are considered authors when they originate ideas and content of their written work. For this reason, most authors are writers, but not all writers are considered to be authors.

b)

An author is the creator or originator of any written work such as a book or play and is also considered a writer. More broadly defined, an author is the person who originated or gave existence to anything” and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created.

c)

The terms “writer” and “author” tend to be used interchangeably. Even experienced writers and published authors may not know the difference between the two. Though the difference between a writer and an author is subtle, it is an important distinction for anyone from freelance writers to New York Times bestselling authors to understand.

And I am still a little confused.