Authors Electric

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie I’ve had a brainwave. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?  (Ah, turns out they have. See below. Never mind, I'm not stopping now.) So many stories – detective and mystery ones in particular – are set in a closed community that your characters can’t get away from. A train perhaps. Or a boat. (Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile .) An office block ( Die Hard , one of my favourite films) or a hotel on fire ( The Towering Inferno ).  The reasons for this are obvious: throw a bunch of different characters together in a tight cauldron, add some kind of disaster or threat, and BOOM, you have all the ingredients for a gripping, heart-in-mouth tale. Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie For children’s authors (including, cough, me) the enclosed setting is more likely to be a holiday camp, or a school – boarding, if possible, meaning that your beleaguered hero really is stuck with all the problem...

It’s the holiday season! Long summer days, schools are out or almost out, and if you're like me you’re probably thinking about a beach somewhere ... I’m lucky in that I live about ten minutes' walk from one of the best sandcastle beaches in the country (according to an experiment carried out by the BBC a few years ago). Above is Preston beach - the one with all the beach huts in the English Riviera resort of Torbay. The red colour of the sand comes from the local sandstone cliffs. You can get here by train on the intercity to Plymouth, which runs along the coast from Exeter via. the recently repaired sea wall at Dawlish. Hop on to the branch line at Newton Abbot, and you'll end up at Paignton, where you can either walk past all the bucket-and-spade shops and casinos to the beach, or board the steam train to continue at a more leisurely fashion down the line to Kingswear and from there via the passenger ferry to the Naval port of Dartmouth. Travel by steam...

                                      POETRY FILM: APOPTOSIS, or CELL SUICIDE Sometimes we have to lose bits of us. It’s called Apoptosis: some of our cells have to self-destruct, instead of living on and multiplying by splitting in two. They do this for our benefit. My animated text poem in the video above undergoes apoptosis to tell that story. An example; the foetal hand is a paddle – many of the cells between the finger bones kill themselves, to free our fingers to gesture, point and grasp things. Things like books. 'I don't think I lost enough cells to grasp this book.'  Writing, in any genre, is as much about taking words out as putting words in. Poetry is about losing as many words as possible without losing any meaning, so that the remaining words also contain homeopathic amounts of the ones that went, concentrated and rich like a reduced sauce. Plays and novels, e...

Writers may come in all sizes and shapes...and some shapes are stranger than others. But in the end they all belong in one of two great camps. FIRST CAMP First off, you have the outliners. Their argument is simple: a  book is a journey and you can't get There till you know every Here on the way. P. G.Wodehouse's outlines ran to to 30,000 words and were done on index cards mounted all over the walls. Horror writer John Saul's outlines may reach a hundred pages while John Grisham's run to fifty. Even Tom Wolfe once lamented that one of his books took a decade to write because, with no outline, he found himself lost. And we can be certain that Virgil had an outline for the Aeneid: an epic divided into two parts of six Books each, with each part containing the same number of lines. SECOND CAMP But the other camp is as large and as loud: non-outliners who insist on going with the flow--letting the book, as it were, write itself...sometimes on rolls of paper...

I was asked this question by an agent after a Society of Authors meeting when we were walking, along with loads of other people, to the restaurant where we had booked a meal. Now, my usual answer to this question is that I write crime novels, but this was an agent, and he was expressing interest, so I had to think hard. How would I describe my crime novels? The answer I came up with was that I wrote dark crime. Darker than Agatha Christie, but not as dark as Val McDermid, although I thought I leaned more towards McDermid rather than Christie. And no, I didn’t get an agent contract, and the guy was probably only making conversation because we were in the same group. But turning over this simple question in my mind I’ve started to wonder what kind of books I do write. I’ve written the Dundee Crime Series, but the only thing that makes these three books a series is because they are contemporary murder mysteries set in Dundee with the same investigative detective team. H...

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that a writer with life experience has an advantage over writers with none. We start at the cradle and continue to learn as we grow and develop, and this gives us a cupboard full of goodies to tap into. When I think of my own journey in becoming a writer it sets me wondering how on earth this ever came about. When I was growing up I didn’t know any writers. Oh, I knew books. I loved books, but the people who wrote them were mystical beings. Probably not even real people. And the teachers who taught us how to write compositions weren’t much help. I well remember the requested three paragraph composition with a beginning, a middle, and an end.           Nowadays, my granddaughter is tasked to write stories, and allowed to let her imagination roam free. Maybe I was born too early because my teachers would have held up their hands in horror at the thought of writing stories. As for imagination, that was ...