Authors Electric

The short list for the BBC National Short Story Award has just been announced and it's a shocker!  There are no men on it... ( David Gilmour take note)  At £15,000 this is one of the most valuable prizes in literature, and it emphasises the short story's status as a literary art form.  The high value we place on the short story is a big contrast with its lack of appeal as a commercial publishing prospect.  Fewer and fewer publishers are accepting them and then only as a gesture towards their best-selling authors.  Newspaper and magazine outlets have also dwindled. But, readers like short stories and writers like writing them.  The result is a flourishing Indie-publishing scene for short fiction - not just in book form, but also in E-zines and blogs and Facebook groups.  People are reading Flash fiction on their mobile phones and downloading stories onto their I-pads from sites where you can read any kind of fiction from erotic to murderous, ...

 Another in an occasional series, where our writers share their sources of inspiration. Dennis Hamley - visit website           Only once can I put my hand on my heart and say I’ve been truly inspired to write with the sudden mysterious lightning flash we all long for. That was for Hare’s Choice , when a multitude of impressions suddenly came together to give me sight of an idea which is the nearest to truly original writing that I have ever achieved,  owing nothing to any genre which I know of.           It's a moment I can’t forget and don’t want to but something which is, I fear, fairly unlikely to happen again. But I can dream.           I must be just about the only writer in the world who doesn’t keep a notebook handy. For me, inspiration, the getting of ideas, is usually quite a mundane affair. The lucky and unl...

          With such a wealth of expertise on Authors Electric we felt it was about time some of us shared our top tips. So here they are:    Bill Kirton "Trust your own voice. You don’t necessarily need big, fancy or poetic words, or a huge vocabulary. Your way of putting things is unique so trust it." Bill Kirton: click here to discover more about Bill  and his work. ______________________________________ Karen Bush "You might think you've spotted all the typos, but really, you haven't. Trust me on this. Try reading it in different fonts: print off hard copies to read as well as on screen as it can help you to catch them. And ask someone to read through it too - doesn't need to be an expert or expensive proofreader, just someone with a reasonable grasp of spelling. And use a highlighter to mark up the errors on paper copies, as when you come back to them to make corrections, it's easy to m...

So we sit down, wake the laptop, place coffee beside keyboard, flex knuckles, stare meaningfully at the ceiling, put on headphones... and begin.  What's going into our ears? Something pure like birdsong? Something contemplative and thoughtful for the earnest business of noveling? Not necessarily. It might just as easily be grinding guitars and ripping vocals. My blog series The Undercover Soundtrack has been going for a year now, and more than 50 writers have so far shared the music that helped them invent and hone their novels. Soundtracks Undercover Soundtracks are not the songs their characters like, or the music played at their weddings. They are writers' secret ingredients, meditative antechambers where they can study their characters’ true natures, conjure an atmosphere or examine the nature of an elusive moment. Catherine Czerkawska Among the first contributors were members of this group. Dan Holloway searched for nostalgia and directionless...