Ashlinn, that's interesting. Maybe it pins down the difference between reading something and teaching it. (I know you're not exactly teaching when you write a report, but it uses a lot of the same muscles).

Emma

Sorry, Emma, I havn't understood your comparison. I was making the difference between content and style not between reading and teaching.
Sorry for being dense.

A.

I think I know what you mean. Even if the genre is to your taste, an unusual style can make it feel like you're hitting head against a wall, while it might attract another reader, who loves that style, to a genre they don't normally like. The different styles of Cloud Atlas come immediately to mind, or the grating style of The Accidental, or the slow mononoty of John Banderville's The Sea. You can play with it by imagining how different an Andy McNab novel would be if written by Enid Blyton, or Where's Spot was rewritten by Will Self, or Wuthering Heights by Alexei Sayle.

how about Mein Kampf by Dr Suess?

how about Mein Kampf by Dr Suess?

Now that would be fun!

Ashlinn, I think what I mean is that as a reader I'm put off by a style I don't find congenial, but as a teacher/report writer my job is to understand what it's trying to do, and how it could do it better, and within limits, I reckon I can do that.

On the other hand, as a reader I might enjoy dipping into SF/F, if only in the spirit of observing the strange habits of the natives (yes, I really, really am missing the SF/F gene!), but as a teacher/report writer I'd be very aware that their habits are so strange to me that I can't begin to judge why they do what they do, or how they could do it better.

Emma

Mein Kampf by Dr Suess?

Pride and Prejudice by Irvine Welsh?

Is info on the Cornerstone's comp available on the net? There's no mention of it on their website, which seems odd...

(Btw, why would they call it the Wow Factor competition, when Waterstone's did that last year??)

You have to email them and they'll send you details.

Just going back to the origins of the thread (sorry if this has been said, I haven't read all four pages of replies), the 2005 WOW Factor competition was a collaboration between Faber and Waterstones. It didn't cost anything to enter and it didn't accept submissions from agents. It was for an unpublished children's writer. The winner is to be published by Faber (it was supposed to be in Sept 06 but is now scheduled for January 07 according to Faber's website). Non-winning finalists got feedback from Julia Wells the senior commisioning editor for children's books at Faber. I revised my book on the basis of her comments and got an agent very quickly.

It doesn't appear that Faber-Waterstones are going to run the competition again. There wasn't one this year. In fact the 2005 event was very low key. There was very little about it on the internet, nothing on Faber's website and even the Waterstones shop posters were small. I had the feeling there'd been a loss of nerve or interest after it had been launched.

Naomi

I'm not sure if I'd need an affinity with the writing style, because if you know a reasonable amount about how writing works, you can usually work out what the writer's trying to do, and then how they could do it better. I might personally write and enjoy reading spare, economical writing of limpid clarity, but I hope I can still tell over-written, thesaurus-backed, bloated nonsense from lavish, gorgeous, baroquely rich prose, and give a some hints on how to change one into the other. If their writing has a very strong flavour of any kind - and I personally love writing that does - and I were talking about submitting it, I might have to say something like, 'you will find that writing like yours isn't to everyone's taste', because it's true: that kind of writing inevitably rouses people's tastes pro- and con-. But one of the jobs in doing this kind of work is to separate your personal taste - in as much as you can - from the quality (or lack of it) of the work.

In response to Ashlinn, I completely agree with what Emma said. I do come across stories that are in a different style to a) what I like to read and b) what I like to write. However, normally the style is the least of the writer's worries, if you know what I mean. Structure, pacing and characterisation are far more important and tend to be what I focus on. If the writer writes short sentences and never uses speech marks, then I am quite happy to go along with it as long as the story itself is still being told well.

I have once told a writer of a picture book that his style was unusual and that he might find it very difficult to place his book. He was a writer along the lines of Neil Gaiman - weird and surreal, which is well-nigh impossible to sell in the pbook market at the moment, especially for a first-time author. However, his illustrations were superb (if scary) so I have no doubt that at some point he will find a niche - assuming he perseveres, of course.

Cornerstones selects the reader for a particular manuscript quite carefully. I often hear from Kathryn 'oh, we've got a pbook that would really suit you' - and I know that's based on the reports I've turned in before. Plus I'm only allowed to critique books in a category in which I have already been published, so my opinion is based on some experience. I also tend to suggest alternatives myself in terms of improving expression - often I will rewrite a short section or a couple of sentences to illustrate my point. Cornerstones is well aware of its readers' strengths, so allocates books based on personal knowledge. I have not yet had to return a book because I did not have an affinity with the style. There is usually lots to say about the basic techniques of writing regardless of style!

I have once (only once, in four years of critiquing) contacted Cornerstones to say I wasn't sure I could write a report on a certain story because I thought it was already near perfect.

By the way, Cornerstones also critiqued my own YA novel and submitted it to three agents on my behalf. One passed it to a reader by mistake (who rejected it) but the other two read the ms within two weeks and rang Cornerstones to offer representation. So I have been on both sides of the fence, so to speak