Authors Electric

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...

I remember the old days, when I used to write everything in longhand, and then type it up on a manual typewriter with a sheet of carbon paper underneath, sometimes even two, and the Tippex at my elbow. A mistake often meant re-typing the whole of a chapter, and editing was literally a cut-and-paste job, which could get both messy and confusing. You posted something off with your heart in your mouth, as your top copy was the only one worth sending out. The photocopy shop charged by the sheet, and the expense was prohibitive.             Then along came the ZX81, with its little silver strip of printout paper, followed by the Spectrum. And then, suddenly, there were Amstrads and Amigas and a revolution had taken place. Writers had deep philosophical conversations about whether writing straight onto a computer somehow hi-jacked the creative process, and whether our work would be the worse for it. And then along came PCs and Apple ...

Karen Bush - visit website I make no apology for offering all three of my top writing quotes from a single source: Terry Pratchett, who is, quite simply, a genius. “To be a writer you’re going to have to read a lot – shitloads in fact. So many books that you’re going to overflow. You’ve got to keep your mind open to all sorts of influences. You’ve got to sit down for hours at a time in front of a computer. And you must make grammar, punctuation and spelling a part of your life.” “There is one thing that I get asked all the time by aspiring writers who contact me. They say ‘I keep starting things; I don’t know how to finish them. I don’t seem to be able to find the time to write. I don’t seem to be able to get my ideas down on paper.’ What I always say is ‘Consider, just consider for a moment, that although you want to be a writer, being a writer may not be where your particular genius lies.” “I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyon...