Customer Reviews

Skin

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I came to Tobias Hill's writing through his novel, The Love of Stones - which is also excellent - and Skin was really just an impulse buy when I was in England this Christmas. Well, The Love of Stones may be good, but Skin wowed me. This is a collection of short stories - not my bedtime reading of preference - but don't let that put you off. A couple of the stories here are long enough to escape into, and really the collection as a whole is a minor classic. Hill gets under the skin of every character and place he writes about. Think you know London? Think again. Ditto LA and downtown Japan. Hill often relies on outsiders to get inside places - immigrant zoo workers, Vegas croupiers, late night drifters - and the leverage he gets with this device gains massive momentum from the quality of his writing. If you haven't read anything by Hill, this would be a great place to start - it just blew me away.

Smarty Pants wants to be a writer. But Smarty Pants has a BIG problem. He has a few stories in mind, but they are no good. He has no proper ideas. He has no knowledge of how to describe true human emotion. Perhaps he doesn't quite know what it is. In any case, Smarty Pants does not want to expose himself in any way to his readers. So Smarty Pants decides to learn some tricks. The tricks of the trade. Because Smarty Pants thinks tricks are what make good literature. Perhaps he joins a creative writing course run by some other Smarty Pants who can teach him a lot of tricks, teach him how to beef up a lousy, impersonal, unemotional piece of text. Use short, snappy sentences. Write about people in strange exotic places. It doesn't matter that you really haven't a clue what you're writing about. It doesn't matter because the readers won't know it either and they don't care anyway - not REALLY. Literary tourism, that's what they want these days, cliched snapshots. Add some pain and some killings. Steal bits and pieces from cheap thriller genres. Then add a LOT of irrelevant details, generally mistaken for ATTENTION to detail. Particularly: every singe paragraph must tell the reader how something smells. Mm, wow, very interesting! When it gets really boring, use present tense. It's all so easy on a word processor, playing around with things. It's just so easy to be a real writer when you know all the tricks and have the technology

The state of literature today. How on Earth did I get through this? Sad to think those trees could still be standing alive and well out in that forest.