English was my best subject at school and I loved reading. From about nine years old I always asked for books for my birthday and Christmas. I even wrote my first novel at fourteen, but I never used to call myself a writer I just made stories up. Often they were in my head, not written down and when I actually wrote, I did nothing with the story. Gradually I began to send off occasional articles to magazines etc. Going to university as a mature student gave me the ability to judge my writing and the knowledge to improve it, so I gained the confidence to call myself a writer.
As a writer I like to think I understand how to be creative using the English language, and I believe creativity is admirable. However sometimes I can be less tolerant of people who don’t seem to know what they are doing. Carelessness with sentence structure, spelling mistakes, inaccurate punctuation and uncorrected typos are not creativity and these things annoy me, although they never used to. Unfortunately there are writers who can get all of this technical and grammatical stuff correct, can get published and still can’t put a worthwhile paragraph together, let alone an interesting novel.
I recognise that my tastes have changed over the years, I’m no longer interested in reading the authors I enjoyed in my teens. However my tastes had changed before I ‘became a writer’. I was already enjoying the intensity of Ian McEwan, the narrative drive of Ian Banks and the dreamlike beauty of Helen Dunmore long before I could define those qualities. I still enjoy their work but am now able to put a finger on why certain of their books are wonderful and others just don’t work for me.
Usually, poor writing quality puts me off reading a novel after a few pages, even if I have incentives for wanting to read it. At the opposite end of the scale, sometimes a novel is terribly 'cleverly' written and that can also put me off, particularly if the style is un-engaging. I tend to prefer empathetic characters telling an engrossing story rather than clever-clever writing. I’m not saying experimentation with style and structure is wrong, I do it myself, but certain well-known authors can get away with an experiment gone too far. Alienating your reader is probably a poor idea even if you're writing about alienation.
I write book reviews on my blog and on Goodreads, but I don't usually review the badly written books. For a start I seldom finish them and anyway what's the point of being rude, it doesn't help the author? If they're already published, somebody likes their stuff. I do sometimes review the clever-clever books, such authors do probably deserve to be told off!
