UK Urban Fiction - HardPressed Publishing

If you're from the UK, or even Europe, ‘How to’ books may well be your undoing, and I’ll tell you for why. Swain, McKee, Blake Snyder are creative writing gurus in the industry. Most of what you’ll read in a ‘How to’ book is a complex paraphrasing of their words.

 All of these gentlemen are American.

Understand – Reading fiction is a Leisure activity.

Americans have a long history of importing a leisure product, repackaging and reformatting it, and trying to export it.

In this instance the product is English literature. The word English offers the faintest clue – it wasn’t theirs in the first place.

A brief look at the track record of export of semi-plagiarised leisure products reads.

Football / Rugby Football re-packaged as American Football. Despite a sustained attempt to market this product as NFL Europe – it has failed.

Rounders repackaged as Baseball. Only the Japanese bought this (probably under the threat of more nuclear bombs.)

Bowling repackaged as Bowling. There was a brief period during the eighties and nineties when a few bowling lanes opened in major cities. These have all since closed.

Summer camp, oversize refrigerators, Gerry Springer style confrontational freak shows.

It appears that what is ‘the American way’ is a passing fad to British public. Even the Evangelistic style writing seminars do not work over here.

So, no. I will not invest my time in the American way.