Sock puppets, anonymity and big brother

In case you don't know, 'sock puppet' is internet slang for someone who assumes a fake identity online, especially with a view to giving extra credibility to something they've written under their real identity.

The phrase has been in the news recently, following the revelation that one particular famous author had been exposed as posting positive reviews of his own books online under different identities, at the same time as posting negative ones about other authors.

Of course, one of the great things about the internet is that it does, within limits, afford a certain degree of anonymity. It makes it easy writers to publish to a mass audience without revealing their true identity (although there's nothing new about the nom de plume). People use fake profiles to say things they would never dream of saying if they thought their true identity might become known.

On the one hand, this can be seen as dangerous. It means that extreme and abhorrent views can gain exposure. But on the other, it surely fosters creativity. It gives writers the chance to explore and try new things. They might get shot down in flames, but it won't matter.

The trouble is that the inevitable abuse of this kind of freedom tends to lead to calls for tighter control. We may find that verified accounts have to be used for people to be able to post reviews on prominent website, for example. I think this would be a step too far – perhaps verification could be used to give some reviews a certain amount of added credibility, but I believe there should always be a place, within certain legal boundaries, for that ultimate freedom of expression that anonymity allows.

Because there's another fascinating phenomenon that could die with growing regulation of the internet. People are complex creatures, and many are using the internet to explore different facets to their personalities, sometimes through the use of avatars in virtual worlds. It is a chance for many to escape the confines of the role that real life circumstances have imposed on them and ask 'what would I be like if...?'. It's a kind of creativity that's almost entirely new: the chance to lead an entirely safe secret double life, and I think it would be a shame if it were lost.

Why does writing get called 'bad' as soon as it's popular?

What makes poor writing? We've seen a not entirely unpredictable backlash against Fifty Shades of Grey from some quarters. It's the reaction that seems to kick in whenever a book (or in this case a trilogy) reaches a certain level of popularity. And I don't think it's completely justified.

It isn't just that it looks like snobbery, although there is, I think, an element of that. The idea that if you are genuinely to appreciate the joy of reading, you must have had a certain level - and a certain kind - of education. If millions of people are enjoying a book, it can't be that good because there can't be that many people with that kind of education. Our 'club' is more exclusive than that ... isn't it?

I said it's not just snobbery because, to be fair, what you think of as good writing will of course be affected by how widely you've read. My reading tastes have certainly changed over the years, and now I would cringe at some of the things I read and enjoyed in my teens and even in my twenties: books full of cliché-ridden characters and hackneyed turns of phrase.

It's also true that we live in a world in which winning a publicity lottery can bring undeserved success - we have celebrities who are famous for nothing more than being famous. And, thanks in no small part to phenomena such as YouTube, people and things can gain incredible popularity (or notoriety) for the most trivial of reasons.

But even if a snowball of hype is how Fifty Shades of Grey achieved its initial success, people are still reading it and they're still enjoying it.

And that's the point: if a particular writing style succeeds in firing your imagination, taking you off to another reality, painting pictures in your mind ... then that writing is good for you. A cliché is a cliché only if you've encountered it many times before.

What's more, if it fails to do those things for someone else, I don't think that person can legitimately say that it's objectively 'bad', even if it's bad for them.

Of course, you may be able to apply all kinds of objective measures to a piece of literature. You may be able to dissect it, analyse it and come up with the conclusion that it's either good or bad. But if your conclusion is at odds with the reaction of millions of readers, might not the flaw be in the analysis, rather than in the readers?

The 100 year old solution to all editing problems

Editors and proofreaders can find themselves under a lot of pressure. After all, it's their job to do the impossible: to achieve 100% accuracy. We all know, of course, that no-one can possibly do this all the time. People are bound to make mistakes.

I recently came across a wonderful solution to the problem in a travel guide published in 1913. Towards the middle of the book, there's a small scrap of paper, bound in, which contains the following message:

TO READERS.


Every care has been taken to render this volume accurate and trustworthy. But changes take place, both in town and in country, with a rapidity which often thwarts the efforts of the most alert and painstaking writer. We should, therefore, esteem it a favour if readers discovering errors, either of omission or of commission, in these pages, would promptly inform us. Such communications will be duly acknowledged and the inaccuracies rectified at the earliest opportunity.


THE EDITOR.

Absolutely marvellous. Maybe this is - or was - standard practice, but I've never seen it before, and I love it.

Evolving English - well worth a visit

If you have any interest in the English language and you haven't been to the Evolving English Exhibition at the British Library, then (if you’re in easy reach of London) go! There is still just over a week before it closes (it runs until 3 April) and some of the exhibits are just breathtaking. In fact, it’s worth going just to take a look at some of the manuscripts and printed documents on display (11th century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example). But there’s also plenty to learn from some of the video and audio clips, and plenty of common myths about English are exploded. You can even listen to regional accents by hitting buttons on a map of the UK. What’s more, it’s free to attend. I went with the SYP last week and was so glad I did. See http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/index.html.

Time to accept the comma splice?

It's one of those things that drive some people mad in a 'Why can't people write in proper sentences?' sort of way.

I have to admit that seeing two sentences lazily strung together with nothing more than a comma has a similar effect on me.

Never heard of the comma splice?

Here's an example:

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days, however it may take longer.'

There are actually two sentences here. One is:

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days.'

The other is:

'However, it may take longer.'

English has a number of ways to join two sentences together. The trouble is that sticking a comma between them isn't one of them.

What you can do is use a conjunction, such as 'and' or 'but' (often preceded by a comma):

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days, but it may take longer.'

Alternatively, why not just use a full stop?

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days. However, it may take longer.'

... or a semi-colon?

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days; however, it may take longer.'

However, could it be time to ditch the rule?

Sometimes, very well-written literature is littered with comma splices. It can have a real affect on the pace of the text.

For example, 'Say what you want, I don't care' suggests hurried speech, with little or no pause between 'want' and 'I'. 'Say what you want; I don't care' just doesn't have the same effect.

And if the usage has become so widespread, how do we distinguish between a 'good' comma splice and a 'bad' one?

If the rule has become that the comma splice is wrong unless it looks OK or it's a good piece of writing, then that's no rule at all.

And perhaps it would spare editors and proofreaders much agonising if we just did away with it!

Two really annoying things about historical fiction

I have a short attention span. I am easily bored. And if a book is set in the present day, something really has to happen very quickly or I will lose interest.

Turn back the clock 500, 1,000 or 2,000 years, though, and it's different. Well researched insights into how people probably lived, thought and acted in the distant past are, I think, fascinating.

There are just two things that you often find in historical fiction that I find really frustrating.

The first is the use of archaic language in completely the wrong time period. Say, 18th or 19th century slang applied to 11th century 'cockneys', who wouldn't even have been speaking anything like the English we recognise today.

I do see why authors do it; I understand that it's a device designed to take you into the past. And I can see that the alternative – to use entirely contemporary language – has its own problems (it's not historical fiction but, leaving aside the fantasy setting, the Lord of the Rings reads to me as though it's set in the 1930s or 1940s).

What I think is much worse, though, is for an author suddenly to switch a character's dialogue to the language they would have been speaking, only to have that character translate the expression into English.

For example: 'Veni, vidi, vici,' said Caesar, 'I came, I saw, I conquered.'

But Caesar – you're speaking Latin anyway. What language are you supposed to be translating into? And for whose benefit?

To me it's the literary equivalent of Lurcio's asides to the camera in Up Pompeii (keeping the Roman theme!). It just seems wrong in a serious novel. Again, I can see why it happens, especially when it comes to famous expressions, as in the example above.

But there's no need to put it in the dialogue, surely? Put the translation in the narrative and we'll all still get it. I promise!

Does the world need semi-colons?

Perhaps not the most pressing issue facing the planet. But I heard an interview recently in which a writer suggested that this particular punctuation mark was redundant, encouraged bad writing and should be done away with.

And you can kind of see the point. Except when it's used to separate items in lists, a semi-colon can always be replaced by a full stop. Shorter sentences tend to be more readable than long ones, so why make your sentences unnecessarily long by using semi-colons?

Certainly, a piece of writing that's littered with semi-colons will look untidy and will be hard to follow. But, personally, I think it would be a shame to do away with anything in the writer's armoury that allows for a little extra nuance of meaning.

The semi-colon allows you to create a closer association between two independent clauses than is possible with a full stop. If you want one thought to flow naturally on from another, then the semi-colon's what you need. It allows you to keep up the pace of a passage of writing, without the pauses created by full stops. So let's hang on to anything that has the potential to make writing just that little bit richer or more diverse.

Are we plunging into a new dark age without realising it?

And can the publishing world help to drag us out of the mire if so?

Apologies for the mixed metaphors, but they both seemed to fit somehow.

Exhibit A: Paul the Octopus. Of course, it's not Paul's fault (and in fact, for all I know, the creature may be a genuine miracle of nature – it's not my place to say otherwise!), but he's the latest in a constant stream of stories that put me in mind of medieval levels of superstition.

To me, they're the modern equivalents of 'two-headed cow in next village predicts doomsday'.

And we seem to love it. My guess is that we've always loved it. And we always will.

It almost seems now as if the 20th century was a brief renaissance – a flirtation with enlightenment, where intellect and learning were respected, but that now we've reverted to type. Give us psychic octopuses (not octopi, by the way!), miraculous images on bits of toast, faces on Mars...

It's not that we didn't have all this a few years ago. Of course we did. But two things have happened to give this kind of thing more prominence and more credibility.

One is, obviously, the internet. You can now publish all kinds of pseudo-science and conspiracy theories online without having to go through any kind of review or approval process. A lot of the nonsense falls by the wayside, destined to be ignored.

But some of it gets noticed.

And some of it does more than get noticed – some of it wins the 'social media lottery'. People set up Facebook groups, start blogs. Before long, the tabloids get wind of the story, then the broadcast media...

And so many of us seem to be taken in. I think it's partly because 'giant spiders could be living on Mars' is just more exciting than 'geological features on Mars slightly resemble spiders' (I did just make this up, by the way).

But I think there's more at play. It's the same phenomenon that means you're guaranteed a great job if you can confidently come up with a lot of meaningless business-speak in the face of a rude and/or aggressive interviewer. Forget whether you can do the job. Just do the interview. If you can talk in a certain way, it almost doesn't matter what you say.

I don't know whether to love or hate the film, but we seem to be hurtling towards Idiocracy with alarming speed.

What's all this got to do with publishing?

Well, I think we really, really need publishers now more than ever.

We need trade publishers to look after our language, to nurture genuinely good writers, to thrive and to produce work that will not be lost in the sea of online material that hasn't been through the rigorous editorial processes that you will find in a publishing house.

And we need academic publishers to be just as vocal in debunking some of the crazier unverified pseudo-science as some bloggers are in proposing it.

This comes down partly to understanding the value of information. The trouble with the internet is that it has led us to believe that information costs nothing. That good writing is free. Journalism is facing the same problem. People don't want to pay for news, and as the traditional business models become unworkable, good quality journalism is in danger of being replaced by pure rumour. Because we've come to see rumour as just as valuable as real news.

To be fair, I think much of the book publishing world is doing itself a lot of good. Publishers are using social media and other technologies to show off the value of what they do. And there seems to have been some movement towards publishers strengthening their own brands, now that it's no longer enough to rely on authors as brands. The message has to be: you can trust this to be a good read – or to be accurate – because we published it.

Great writing needs great editing

I've been reading Wolf Hall (winner of last year's Man Booker prize) and couldn't help wondering about the (relatively) unsung heroes involved in putting it together. It is a beautifully written book, and it must have presented a unique challenge to the editors and proofreaders who worked on it.

I have no insight into precisely how they worked, but, to my mind, they must deserve credit for striking that difficult balance between making sure the text is correct and not interfering with the author's style. There are one or two instances, for example, in which an over-zealous proofreader might have replaced the odd semi-colon with a comma.

Now, this particular book might have required lots of editing or none at all, for all I know, but it did make me wonder. How many great works of literature have seen the light of day thanks to a light editorial touch? And have any ever been stifled by an excessivley heavy hand?

Do publishers make good writers?

We're betting that they do. A publishing house is a natural habitat for an aspiring writer, and plenty of successful authors have started their careers as editors.

We're also interested in learning about publishers' experiences when just starting out in their careers.

The result: a writing competition for publishers. If you've worked in publishing (full-time, part-time, freelance or as an intern), and you think you could write a short piece about your experiences when just starting out, we would love to hear from you. First prize is £500, and you can find full details at www.edittrain.co.uk/competition.

Is it possible to write a book in 24 hours?

Yes, according to Spread the Word, which has commissioned the Society of Young Publishers (see www.thesyp.org.uk/newsfull.php?id=372), Completely Novel and if:book to do just that.

The project starts on Saturday 3 October and the book will be edited, proofread and prepared for publication on Sunday, ready to go on sale on Monday 5 October.