John S Alty

Well done,J!
And well done to you too, Ath for setting the comp ☺️

Yay indeed – well done Janette! And well done for choosing from such a disparate selection, Athers.

The Softness Of Untouched Snow

‘I say, Lilian, there’s a fair covering out there. Fancy a walk – a slide?’
‘Silly old beggar.’ I shook my head and carried on knitting. ‘Out there, in that? Slipping and shivering – at our age?’
‘Shivering means you’re alive. Come on, old lass, it’s been a long time indoors. Lets make some footprints afore anyone…[Read more]

As per Neil Gaiman’s fifth rule of writing:

‘Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.’

I heard an interesting podcast a while ago by Sophie Hannah. She mentioned agents who reject with more than the standard brush-off. They are generally finding there is something the matter with the submission but can’t or won’t put their finger on it so instead may jump to an “obvious” criticism and give you that. Her suggestion was that you…[Read more]

Having written an entire novel in colloquial first person a la Catcher in the Rye, having made a conscious effort to break through my inhibitions about departing from Oxford (or Queen’s, or formal – call it what you will) English to do so, and having found the process liberating and rather fun, I’ll give a heartfelt ‘Hear, hear!’ to that. Okay,…[Read more]

Oh, it has worked!

I’ll go back to my quill and parchment.

Thanks, Richard. I tried to copy the link first of all and couldn’t make it work. Thank you for a working link to Emma Darwin.

BTW have you seen this on the BBC news website today?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55937512

Blast, link not working. BBC news website, go to the Wales tab. “Station reopening at Bow Street brings first trains for…[Read more]

Well bugger me. Apparently, if you just copy and paste a URL into here, without bothering with that ‘link’ button, it links automatically. You live and learn.

It occurs to me that one reason for over-use of ‘I’, or any other pronoun come to that, is filtering. This is another cause of the ‘frustrating distance’ Libby mentions, and Emma Darwin (Who else?) explains it far better than I could.

As Richard says, this is seems more about style, and a rigid editor, than about the rich possibilities of first-person narrators.

I’m the first to agree that repetition of ‘I’ can be a problem, just as repetition of any word can trip up the reader. And the over-repeated ‘I’ can be hard to get rid of, as I know from my own efforts.

It can also…[Read more]

My immediate and visceral reaction to both criticisms was ‘Bollocks!’ If writing in first person, what other pronoun is there for you to use? How are you going to avoid the pronoun? If writing in third person, does the same criticism apply to ‘he, ‘she’ or ‘they?’ I suspect the real problem is not with the pronoun itself but with the style. As for…[Read more]