Books and Reviews

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.