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John had been a great believer in creating his own writing style, or more accurately his lack of one. He’d paid particular attention to the number of words in a sentence and the number of sentences in a paragraph. Verbiage, as he called the excessive use of words, was the great enemy of writers:
Words only appear to be your friends; but you should think of them as the speed bumps on your page; they can slow the story down as much as they can keep it bowling along
.
    He had even created a writing lexicon of words that writers from the
atelier
were forbidden to use; words like ‘corollary’, ‘detumescent’, ‘uxorious’, ‘polyglot’, and ‘felicitous’.
    As a rough rule of thumb, don’t use a word that isn’t in theMicrosoft Word dictionary, unless it’s a proper noun, of course. Equally, don’t ever be afraid of using clichés. Not in my books. If you want your novel to be a page-turner then make clichés your friends. Clichés – the kind of writing that Martin Amis makes war on – are the verbal particle accelerators to finishing books. Original writing just slows a reader down and makes him feel inadequate. Like he’s thick. Which of course he is, but there’s no sense in rubbing that in. My readers actively approve of clichés. And forget about similes and metaphors; if you want to use similes and metaphors then go and write fucking poetry, not one of my books. People don’t like it. That’s why poetry doesn’t sell.
    About the use of swear words in his books Houston was equally circumspect:
    No more than one per chapter. And only in situations of extreme stress. A lot of people in Middle America don’t much care for profanity, so within reason, it’s best avoided.
    Sergeant Savigny was still explaining why he admired the Houston canon. Harold Bloom it wasn’t, but listening to the Frenchman I had an idea that John would have been delighted with his deconstruction of John’s work:
    ‘The great thing about Jack Boardman is the way that you don’t get too much useless description; the woman wore a white dress and that’s it. Job done. I don’t need to know if the dress came from Chloé and if her shoes matched her handbag and her panties. If I want that kind of shit I’ll read
Vogue
. Also, I like the fact that you can just put the books down and then pick them up again without losing the plot.’
    ‘As a matter of fact I wrote all of the Jack Boardman books.’
    ‘You don’t say.’
    Amalric frowned. ‘This is not something we understand. Houston puts his name to a book that you write, MonsieurIrvine, and he gets the big money while you are paid – forgive me – like a hired hand. How is this possible?’
    ‘He comes up with the story,’ I said. ‘The stories are pretty good. As Sergeant Savigny has explained, the stories are why people buy Houston’s books, not because of any fancy writing. We didn’t go in for much in the way of metaphors and similes. Just straight descriptions. You’re not supposed to notice the writing very much – just the story. He came up with the plots and I – or someone like me – wrote them. The actual writing was something that bored him greatly. Really it’s a bit like what Bismarck is supposed to have said about laws being like sausages. You should never watch either one being made. It’s best just to read the final product and not to pay any attention to the creative process. But that’s only my opinion. John himself loved to talk about the whole business of writing and exactly how he produced his books. He was really very open about it. Much more open than I’d ever have been. Especially when you’re talking to these bastards on the
Guardian
who are just looking to trip you up and tell the world what a fraud you are. The
Guardian
is a left-leaning newspaper in this country. They don’t like anyone with a bit of money. A bit like
Libération
in France, I think, but with less style. Anyway the lefties loved to hate John. What was it