Authors Electric

Doors closed on originality? Photo by burcubyzt_85: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/vintage-wooden-door-with-distinctive- handles-36306962/ I learnt something new on X the other day. (And no, it wasn’t the latest cancellations, though there’s plenty of that going on).  I can’t remember how it came up, but both Lissa Evans (a writer I greatly admire) and I were intrigued to discover the origin of the term cliché. I am rather ashamed that I never bothered to look it up before. I’d always assumed it had something to do with the French for a door closing: a boring, hackneyed phrase shutting off originality. Goodness knows where I got that notion from because it’s definitely barking up the wrong tree (an idiom, by the way, not a cliché; a nice distinction I found going down rabbit holes online… oops, there goes another).  How to describe a beautiful sunset and bring it freshly to life. Instead, the verb clicher means ‘to click’. Its use as a noun goes back as far as 1825 and originat...

Between the ages of 12 and 13 I had an amazing English teacher. She was young, warm, funny, kind, extraordinarily widely-read and determined that we should be too. She only stayed a year before returning to the USA but in that time we studied Lord of the Flies, Silas Marner, Julius Caesar, Arms and the Man , most of The Master Builder (a bridge too far, that was) and some short stories including E M Forster’s The Machine Stops ( which recently had a new lease of life, thanks to Covid ) and a shocking tale called The Lottery. (I know. It was only years later I discovered Shirley Jackson’s short story to be one of the most famous of all.)     Mrs McGrath is in my mind now because, in addition to opening my eyes to such a fabulous world of literature, she taught me a rather more painful lesson: she was the first person to introduce the concept of cliché into our innocently creative minds. I’d been accustomed, till that moment, to have my depictions of Dark, Ghostly Nights and ...