Authors Electric

For the last few months I have been trying to make a decision. I have finished a new book and I need to work out what might be the best way to publish it. Twenty years ago I would really only have had one option. Now there are so many options that it is hard to know which way to go. Given that my recent memoir 'Dead Babies and Seaside Towns' attracted some amazing publicity, I probably was in a strong position to get my novel published by a mainstream publisher. But finally I decided that I just didn't want to do that. Previous experiences had left a bad taste in my mouth. I didn't feel confident that a mainstream publisher would publish the book in the way I wanted. And, anyway, crowd funding publisher Unbound had done a great job on my memoir - and I had really enjoyed working with them. So I've decided to go down that route again. It will be hard raising the subscriptions (which I need to do before the book will be published). I know that. What I d...

A few years ago I heard author Tracy Chevalier talking at a literary festival. She said something which fascinated me. People think, she said, that writing a novel is a hugely freeing and imaginative process. You can do anything you want, create any characters you want, any world. But the reality, she said, is that writing a novel is mainly a process of closing doors, identifying the novels you don't want to write. I think that is very true. But the question is - how much time do you spend 'playing' and when does the moment come when you have to take decisions? By 'playing' I mean time spent experimenting, trying things out, messing around to see what comes up. When I talk about 'making decisions' I'm thinking of that moment when you suddenly say - no, the main character isn't a doctor, she is an architect. I became interested in this question of 'play' versus decision making through writing plays. Until I started doing that I had...