Authors Electric

ChatGPT in action. Photo by Matheus Bertelli: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/laptop-office-working-internet-16094045/ Katherine Roberts’s  experiment with ChatGPT  got me thinking. As yet this AI writing tool can in seconds produce reams of prose, matching the prompts given, in a way that no one, adult or child, will ever want to read. So far, so good. (Or satisfyingly bad.) But any complacency on the part of genuine flesh and blood authors is misplaced. As Katherine and others have pointed out, this bot learns quickly. We can’t rule out that, sooner or later, given enough original material from an inventive editor, say, it will be able to create a gripping, heart-warming tale with all the right kind of characters, and dialogue that doesn’t make your ears bleed. Something actually readable. Publishing houses will save heaps of dosh by eliminating authors altogether from the equation and we writers will, er, be written out of history.  An alarming prospect, and not just fo...

First, get rid of the parents. Rule 1 of writing a children’s adventure story. You have to neutralise the parents in some way because they’ll prevent your child characters running any sort of risk further than climbing the odd tree, or getting home after dark.  Tree-climbing with parents - not much risk here. Photo by Darina Belonogova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ people-climbing-the-tree-8764872/ That’s why so many heroes of children’s books are either orphans, or have parents unable to function as a result of illness or other misfortune.  For obvious reasons, stories for adults don’t have to follow this rule; hence I was convinced - at the beginning - that a book I read recently was for children, not grown-ups. The heroine was 13, after all, and most of the other characters were younger than that. Their father was away collecting plants in Tibet (the classic Absent Explorer Father trope), while their mother was taken seriously ill right at the start of the story. The ch...

Radnor House School, Twickenham It’s extraordinary what you can find in a school. I don’t mean the usual collection of classrooms, gym, assembly hall, dining room, with a scattering of lost trainers, sweatshirts, bald tennis balls and trodden on pieces of paper.  It’s quirks of architecture that appeal to me. When a school is made up of a jumble of old buildings, all from different historical periods, the scope for hidden doors, secret rooms and passage ways is extremely appealing (as you might tell from the way these elements crop up in my books, taking my poor heroes on terrifying journeys). Until a week ago, I thought I knew the limits you could go to with a school’s environment without losing all sense of realism and thereby your readers’ suspension of disbelief; but then a week ago I’d never heard of Radnor House School. Alexander Pope's villa. Engraving by Nathanial Parr from 1735 painting by Michael Rysbrack Radnor House is an attractive 19th century red brick building in T...

Fresh, deliciously green copies of The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel This time last year I was just a few weeks away from publishing my third children’s novel, The Fall of a Sparrow . No book launch, alas, because of lockdown, but that didn’t spoil the excitement of all those lovely fresh, deliciously green books arriving from the printers and appearing online and in bookshops. So what does a writer do at that moment, apart from buzz around doing book signings (where possible) and school visits (where invited), plus the odd radio/magazine interview?  Well, she starts on her next book of course. If she’s not well into it already. Certainly a whole year later, there should be at least a first draft in the can, if not a second/third/fourth. Writers burst with ideas, don’t they, characters running around in their heads, banging on their temples, me me me they cry, what about ME, it’s my story now, get ON with it…. Erm. Yes. Or, in my case, not so much.  People often ask:...

A recent newspaper headline caught my eye: ‘TV’s next Downton will be the American novel that inspired it.’ ( The Times , 14 th  May 2020.) Any guesses?  Highclere Castle (aka Downton Abbey) Intrigued, I read on to discover the novel in question is The Custom of the Country by one of my favourite authors, Edith Wharton.  Now, this is a great book, but I would never in a million years have related its theme of unscrupulous social climbing to the golden atmosphere of benign overlordship that suffuses Downton Abbey . (Which isn’t meant as a criticism of  Downton Abbey – I’ve basked in the cosy escapism provided by all 6 series.) Here, in all the plotlines featuring good or bad behaviour, whether among the upper or the servant classes, I can’t remember a single one in which a ruthless, ambitious, hard as nails nobody sets out to topple the ancient social order and succeeds . There are a couple of devious valets, one Irish nationalist chauffeur, some bra...

I never had E M Forster down as a reliable predictor of future inventions. He is remembered chiefly for novels in which nicely brought up English girls rebel against the class system that imprisons them, taking charge of their own lives and often causing havoc on the way.  When set against gorgeous backgrounds such as Tuscany, these stories make for ravishing films, most notably Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View .  Florence: a ravishing setting Photo by  Maegan White  from  Pexels     But recently, as lockdown has forced us all into new patterns of (in)activity, each confined to our own Unit of Habitable Accommodation*, my mind has kept going back to one of Forster’s short stories I read as a teenager, decades ago.  The Machine Stops is – as far as I know – Forster’s only venture into science fiction (happy to be proved wrong, let me know, dear reader). As such I wouldn’t expect it to be particularly prescien...

Let me ask you something: who do you think is the most terrifying villain in literature? Mask of Him Who Must Not Be Named Plenty of candidates to choose from. Voldemort in Harry Potter , Sauron in The Lord of the Rings , the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays , Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories; or going back further in the canon, Macbeth, Iago, Edmund, Richard III (as depicted by Shakespeare, I hasten to add, before any Ricardians take me apart), Mephistopheles… These are all splendidly evil figures. But not, to my mind, the most terrifying, for one big reason: we know what they are. The reader is in no doubt, from the word go, that each one of these is a Bad Lot, and how the hero will or won’t overcome them becomes the central drama of the story. (In Macbeth’s case you could say it centres on whether the hero’s better self will overcome his dark side.)   No. Far more frightening, for m...