Authors Electric

Image Credit:  One photo taken by me, Allison Symes. Other images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. It has been a funny month. Had a fabulous Scottish holiday. Then came home after a swimming session to find I’d been burgled. Thankfully my dog was okay. They locked her in a room. We’re okay but it has brought home the joys of creative writing. I planned to write about this topic anyway but it is with more feeling I do so now!     Why? Because it was therapeutic to get back to writing after dealing with other matters. It was a relief to be creating characters for stories and working out ideas for blogs, including this one. It was good to resume my normal writing life. There is something about the creative arts which is good for us. I guess it is because they give us an outlet. I have yet to decide whether some nasty burglar gets their comeuppance in a future flash fiction story. If I do this, I shall enjoy every moment of writing it! I suspect you’ve seen the cof...

I have always seen myself as a dyed-in-the-wool/seat-of-the-pants kind of writer and so, when I begin a new project, I will have an opening and an ending (of a kind that exists way over there in the dim distance), a rough notion of who is making the trip and vague notes on how they are going to get there. However – not unlike travelling the M6 – there are no end of things that can cause detours and delays between start and finish, and I am not averse to bumping off various characters for a bit of added tension! There are writers who plot and plan in minutest detail and produce notes on each section almost as long as the end product; a process that I would call a first draft. I can see the logic behind such meticulous plotting, especially when embarking on a crime novel of the whodunit variety. I reasoned that this genre necessitated my change of tactics – i.e. a fully formed synopsis – because the signposts and clues need to be seeded with more precision. With that in mind I pla...

Novels always carry the careful ‘any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is coincidental’ disclaimer but, as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t really needed. I may borrow how someone looks, or copy what he/she wears, but using a real person as a model just doesn’t work for me. I've only tried it twice. For the woman, it sort of half worked, but when it came to the man, I found that my awareness and knowledge of the actual person prevented my character from growing and being himself. Presumably (and it was certainly true in my case), a writer ‘uses’ a real model because there’s something special or unique about that person – he/she is wonderful or despicable. The real man I chose to copy was the latter but he wasn’t my character. In the end, I had to free the character and let his nastiness develop in the way he wanted to express and live it. The result was that, even though he’d begun as a clone of the real nasty, he turned out to be more charismatic (in a horrible way, ...

We ask a lot of our characters. Should we ask the same of ourselves? I've just returned from a trip to Malaysia. It's a wonderful, multicultural country with some of the kindest people in the world. But this trip has thrown three significant unexpectednesses at me - just the sort of thing we throw at our characters. Firstly, the weather. Floods kept me from the travelling deep into the rainforest: would I ask my fictional self to get caught in the floods, to wade waste-deep with crocodiles and leeches, in an effort to reach safety? The tail-end of the monsoon continued to ravage the east coast and made reaching an island, with its palm trees and snorkelling, difficult as the ferries were unreliable in the stormy weather. My fictional self would have gone anyway, huddled on the beach with the snakes and monkeys and had sand blown in her eyes. Secondly, the Chinese New Year, a time of glorious celebrations with fireworks and dragons, stretches the public transport system t...

by Bill Kirton Detail is all When I’m writing about writing or answering questions during talks and workshops, my stress always seems to be on characters. Plots, themes, descriptions – these and other things all play crucial roles but they need beings moving amongst them to give them their point and focus. Even God realised an empty landscape, however beautiful, needed a bit of drama. It was fine to have all these unnamed animals wandering about in lush pastures. Fine but boring. It needed someone to start asking what the point of it all was, maybe a bit of mindless violence, a touch of sex, something to disturb the harmony. So he got the clay, made a bloke, nicked a rib, made a woman and here we are. For me, stories rely heavily on credible characters. They don’t have to be good. In fact bad characters are often more interesting. Perhaps I’m just saying that because I happen to write crime fiction but even in other genres and in mainstream ‘literary’ novels, the most memor...