Authors Electric

Advert in the tiny airport at Canaima, Venezuela, complete with glorious spelling mistake. With the world in turmoil, and shortly about to embark on a holiday to Cyprus we booked last year, it struck me as a subject worth discussing. We all write dramatic scenes from time to time, and as England isn’t the riskiest place in the world we frequently use faraway destinations. As always, I prefer to write from personal experience, as online research can only go so far. It’s the smells and tastes that often enliven writing. Although we may not recall them as well as we do the visual and the auditory, that’s why they are important and they can be very powerful memories. Woodsmoke always takes me back to my first visit to Zakopane, in Poland, with my father, in 1965. The smell was everywhere, and not unpleasant. No central heating then, just tall wood-burning stoves that heated a room to perfection. The same stoves they had in Ukraine, where I’ve been three times, and is now one of the most da...

Whatever you’re writing, on the whole, people need to get from one place to another. And the more experiences you have yourself, the more likely it is to occur to you to use something a bit different. When I started thinking about this, I decided to list every experience I’d had, but, to my surprise, there were so many that I had to create some categories. So, land, sea or air, and weather. Weather is easiest. Snow and ice are the obvious examples. I first learned to ski in Poland with my father, when I was fifteen. I wasn’t very good at it, and I’m still not very good at it. But I did discover what it’s like to head down a slope which is far steeper than you thought, and the terror when you realise there’s no alternative to just keeping going. On the other hand, there was the sheer pleasure of a gradual descent through tracks in pine forests with hawfinches, crested tits and black squirrels. Skating was something that scared the living daylights out of me. But my six year-old da...

There are a handful of books that made a big impression on me as a teenager. The King Must Die , by Mary Renault, and  The Lost World , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, are the two that had the biggest impact. Both of these are now available as e-books, and I’ve re-read both recently on my Kindle. In the last few years I’ve visited the settings for both these books; one was a bit of a disappointment, and the other was far more impressive than I’d ever expected. and             The King Must Die is a brilliant book, narrated by Theseus and covering his time in Crete as a bull-dancer. Theseus is very much of his time and place; supernatural explanations for geological phenomena seem obvious to him, and his belief that he is the son of Poseidon perfectly plausible. Nevertheless, everything that occurs in the book happens for scientific reasons, and there is no supernatural element at all. I don’t think I’ve ever read somethin...