Authors Electric

"Where do your ideas come from?" is supposedly the question writers are asked most often, although the question I've probably been asked most is "How much do you earn?" or, possibly, "When are you going to write a proper book?" Maybe I should move in better circles.  I heard a new question for writers recently, while chatting with some writer friends. One was struggling with several drafts of an idea she loved but wasn't finding easy and asked, plaintively, "How do you know when what you're noodling about with is going to be finished? At what point do you know you're not wasting your time and you're working on an actual book?" We were floored for a moment. Then one of us offered the suggestion that if you could make it to, say, five thousand words on a project, that meant you were probably going to finish it. Some agreed, some disagreed. Some quibbled about the number. House, wikipedia Personally -- and this is ...

The start of the New Year inspired some authors to share images on Faceboook of the views from their writing area. There were some truly beautiful pictures – which made me yearn more for a holiday than writing time… but that’s probably just me. These views were also a huge contrast to the one I have, and it got me thinking – does our surroundings unintentionally influence the genre we choose to write? I always think writing by the sea is very special. UK or abroad, to me, it just looks beautiful and calming and inspirational. The office window looks out onto a veranda, or pier, and the sun glistens off the water before streaming through to the author’s workspace. It’s easy to see why so many of those authors who shared images like these write about romance, or humorous situations, or family life and children’s books. You can almost taste the salty sea-breeze from their novels.   My writing space is one half of my bedroom. I set it up last year after I self-published my de...

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...