Stories are easy, sentences are hard

That, roughly, was what James Patterson said on last night’s edition of The Verb, Ian McMillan’s always entertaining discourse on matters literary on BBC Radio 3. Fortunately I had timed the washing up to catch Patterson’s thoughts on writing, though this also meant I couldn’t capture his exact words because my hands were in the sink. Still, if phenomenally successful ‘commercial writer’ (as he modestly described himself) finds sentence-level work harder than creating block-buster plots, where does that leave all the carefully-structured word, sentence and text level work in the literacy strategies?

Just where they were, I suppose.

(And, yes, I could listen again online to The Verb to discover Patterson’s exact words – but hey, sentences are hard and it’s easier to tell you to that yourselves. You’ll enjoy it.)