Authors Electric

Say we all contain two sides--the Impractical and the Practical--and they're seldom evenly balanced.    And they're never more out of whack than they are with writers. From the get-go the pressure's on to give the P's the upper hand: good grades lead to better schools which pave the way to better homes, cars, marriages, credit scores, job advancement, etc. And the debates grow shorter and shorter between such staid P's and wild writerly I's like sexual adventure, wanderlust, wild living, bucking the Establishment, etc. From Byron to Pushkin to Hemingway to Mailer and on and on and on, wild and crazy role models call to us like Sirens. Self-destructive lifestyles still make for boffo Post Mortem book sales and movie tie-ins. But the publishing industry's changed now. And more than ever IQ and PQ are on everybody's minds. Wild men and women are far less in demand. The powers that be demand higher IQs: media savvy, Facebook presence, fanatical convention at...

Milk Bombs, the girl with the bestest breasts in college, had only one thing in common with the agent I've come to call Cutie. Still, each derailed me for a while with her own spin on this terrible insult: I lived too much in my head....I was too 'literary.' To begin at the beginning of the end, Milk Bombs looked more than a little like this: MB's slice with the knife lacked surgical precision but it cut me to the quick. And it accomplished her purpose of laying me flat. For I'd set out in my sophomore year to out-Byron Byron--nailing every girl in sight while drinking myself into stupors and learning to fight while I learned how to write. I had a weekly column in the student paper and had already written/directed/produced/acted in one play...while pursuing more sexual conquests. With a single swipe she cut me twice, ridiculing my literary and action aspirations. "You're just a Paper Man. Goodbye." So writing was useless in her eyes...and m...

          Parody is enormous fun, and I teach a class on how to write it each term in my creative writing courses Malden Centre and Surrey Hills Onward Learning   because the students enjoy it so much. It doesn't seem as daunting as starting something from scratch. It’s actually a very good way of finding out about other writers’ styles, although you have to choose someone with a distinctive voice. Hemingway is an excellent subject, with his absence of adverbs, and reasonably easy to do as a consequence. Chandler and Spillane are good targets as well. Probably the most famous parody of all is Cold Comfort Farm , by Stella Gibbons, which took the mickey out of the accounts of rural life by writers such as Mary Webb, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, concentrating on sexual undercurrents, muddy fields and inheritances. This is one of my favourite passages: …He looked up as Judith entered, and gave a short, defiant lau...

          The first thing most writers ever tackle is the short story. Either because it’s something they do at school, or because it’s less daunting than a book. It’s the preferred form in creative writing classes, as a number of them can be read out during the course of a two-hour lesson. It’s also one of the staple exercises of the creative writing degree, as once again it can be marked without too much tutor time being used up.           The print markets aren’t as widespread as they used to be, and competitions may be the only outlet for the more literary story as they don’t specify subject matter. But there’s a distinct possibility of an electronic rebirth. Dr. Who isn’t the only one who comes back in new disguise.  Short fiction on the Kindle may be the discerning commuter’s alternative to the computer game.             The fi...