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RichardB posted an update 7 years, 4 months ago
For those of you who don’t know, we’re still in the habit of giving our autistic son a bedtime read, and this can be quite instructive because he chooses library books I wouldn’t touch. The one we’re in the middle of at the moment could be set as a textbook on the subject of how not to write a novel. Belt-and-braces showing-plus-telling, long chunks of exposition, statements of the obvious, verbal tics, turgid prose, cardboard characters, a ‘plot’ made up of a chain of separate incidents bolted together…. the delights go on and on. How does this bilge get published?
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I know… Not a ‘celebrity’ author, is it?
Er, no. It’s a run-of-the-mill piece of women’s fiction. I have just done a bit of on-line digging, and I’m appalled to discover that the author is represented by the winner of the British book Awards Literary Agent of the Year. The mind boggles. I mean, she can’t even punctuate. For instance, she separates a parenthetical phrase, not by brackets or dashes… either of which would be correct… but like I’ve just done, with three dots. I can write better than this in my sleep.