Bad prose is apparently essential.<\/p>\n
I recently got an email about L.J. Ross, the “Queen of Kindle,” an English author I’d never heard of, who’s apparently sold millions of books. So I went to Amazon to check out the first book in her series.\u00a0 As a newspaper and radio reviewer for many years, I was struck by what the review quotes said, and what they didn\u2019t say:<\/p>\n
“LJ Ross is the queen of Kindle” – Sunday Telegraph<\/p>\n
“Holy Island is a blockbuster” – Daily Express<\/p>\n
“A literary phenomenon” – Evening Chronicle<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There was nothing about the books as<\/em> books–these papers all tout her success, not her writing. It made me wonder if Ross might be a phenomenon like the author of Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em>. That is, a huge bestseller despite ridiculous characters and laughable prose.<\/p>\n
I downloaded a sample of Ross\u2019s Holy Island<\/em>, her debut novel which is set on Lindisfarne Island off Northumbria.\u00a0 But I couldn’t make it past the first few pages for a number of reasons.\u00a0 The clich\u00e9s of \u201chuddled together for warmth\u201d and \u201ccrashing waves\u201d put me off.\u00a0 The larger clich\u00e9 is a tired crime fiction trope: the trapped woman.<\/p>\n
Lucy wakes up shivering near a famous ruined priory, and “her skin is exposed and helpless.”\u00a0 Helpless?\u00a0 A person can be helpless, but her skin itself?\u00a0 And why not tell us how exposed she is, why make us guess?\u00a0 Then we learn that she thinks her eyes are open but she’s not sure because it’s so dark.\u00a0 It’s hard to believe anyone would not know whether their eyes were open or closed–but it turns out the darkness isn’t that deep anyway because she can see an outline of the priory and the sky is only “ink-blue” and \u201clittered with stars.\u201d<\/p>\n
A bit further on Lucy tries to “feel her way to the edge.”\u00a0 What edge?\u00a0 We never learn.<\/p>\n
She calls for help and hears someone approaching: \u201cThe footsteps maintained their unhurried gait and followed their inevitable path.”\u00a0 People maintain a gait, not their footsteps.\u00a0 But the author separates other things as well when she writes “Her mind struggled to process the words, to believe her ears.”\u00a0 Is her mind some separate thing unconnected to her?\u00a0 Wouldn’t just saying “She” be simpler and more accurate?<\/p>\n
I read across genres and love good story-telling, but I can’t waste my time on writers whose writing is below par.\u00a0 Especially writers who have people dying awful deaths suddenly thinking of something pleasant just before they die\u2014in this case it\u2019s \u201chome.\u201d\u00a0 That’s another tired fiction moment.<\/p>\n
Even the Amazon description of the book is poorly written, because it claims that the island of Lindisfarne is\u00a0 “cut off from the English mainland by a tidal causeway.”\u00a0 Causeways connect<\/em> islands, but perhaps whoever wrote that was in the spell of her prose.\u00a0 Bad writing can sometimes be hypnotic.<\/p>\n
Lev Raphael teaches creative writing workshops<\/strong> at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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Bad prose is apparently essential. I recently got an email about L.J. Ross, the “Queen of Kindle,” an English author I’d never heard of, who’s apparently sold millions of books. So I went to Amazon to check out the first book in her series.\u00a0 As a newspaper and radio reviewer for many years, I was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[877],"tags":[518,5,95,1584,219,1436,1581,1582,197,1583,19,1580,380,1219,495,206],"class_list":["post-4165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-book-reviews","tag-books","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-creatvie-writing-workshops","tag-crime-fiction","tag-detective-fiction","tag-fofty-shades-of-grey","tag-lindisfarne","tag-mysteries","tag-northumbria","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-writers","tag-writewithoutborders-com","tag-writing","tag-writing-workshops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4165"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4185,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165\/revisions\/4185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}