Gushing, picking nits and cryptic lists

Sharon Wheeler

As most journalists will tell you, muttering under your breath and staring at a blank Word document waiting for inspiration to strike comes with the territory. But if you write for a living, you can’t have any truck with so-called writer’s block.

A writer friend of mine always says briskly that she can’t afford to have writer’s block. After all, if you don’t write, you don’t get paid. That thought concentrates the mind wonderfully.

I was catching up writing some reviews this week and for some reason was finding them awkward to complete. I had half a dozen album and a couple of book reviews to finish like yesterday. My usual approach to writing is to get ideas down on the page, be it words or phrases that have leapt into my mind, and then edit later. So there was a list of seemingly unrelated statements on the screen and not a lot in the way of fluent prose.

Half the problem was that I liked both of the books, and most reviewers will tell you that those are the worse reviews to write, as you don’t want it to sound like you’re gushing constantly, but you also don’t want to appear to be picking insignificant nits …

The albums were a different matter, and served to confirm my friend Lee’s theory that no decent music comes out of Canada! So I was having to send my sarcastic gene off with its case packed for a holiday … Even then, it was a matter of trying to balance the considerable negatives (why the hell does what the Canadians call indie music sound like 1960s UK prog rock bollocks?) with the faintest sliver of a positive.

In the end, I knocked off six album reviews in an afternoon and evening (that included listening to them as well as writing, in case you’re wondering what took me so long!), and polished the book reviews the next morning. And at times it did feel like I was keeping a shopping list, as I typed cryptic words or phrases onto the page – Virgin Mary, lift music, garden shed, spaghetti western and tinnitus all made perfect sense to me, honest!

I did make one discovery, though. Beware of multi-tasking while you are reviewing albums. There I was, listening to a deeply bizarre but really rather good album called The House on the Causeway and wondered why it had a spoken word bit which sounded like an advert for air fresheners in the middle. But then it was a strange album, so I shrugged and started adjusting my review accordingly. And then I realised it was something on the ITV site which I had open in the background. Quite what it all had to do with an online interview with the actor Ben Miller was beyond me …