Authors Electric

 Ever been writing something, and suddenly realised you have no idea how to get from A to B? In fact, you have very little idea of what A and B actually look like apart from a few important details such as the pub, the flooded quarry and the cave in which the escaped tiger is hiding. Which direction you would choose? What you would have to pass through/over/under? How long would it take? What method of transport would you use? Or do you suddenly realise that C couldn’t possibly be related to D without some very unlikely incest, or that E and F would never speak the same language or be old enough to have met Stalin? We tend to think we understand the worlds we create so well that we don’t need any help to remember the details, but you can get it so wrong. Even a well-respected author such as C.S.Lewis can create anachronisms, especially when you have two worlds where time moves differently. What really upset me as a child was the time discrepancy between The Voyage of the Dawn Tread...

There’s a lot of advice for writers out there, some of it very Authors Electric Mari Biella good. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s “Have the courage to write badly” is essential for any writer who doesn’t want to give in to utter despair whilst reading through their first drafts. Harper Lee’s advice to aspiring writers that they would be “wise to develop a thick hide,” is more relevant than ever in the age of Amazon and Goodreads. Paul Theroux’s blunt suggestion that young would-be writers should “leave home” makes sense – your parents are unlikely to understand, still less support, your decision to become a writer and starve in a garret, so perhaps you’d do well to cut the apron strings. As for Dorothy Parker’s advice that the greatest favour one could do for wannabe writers was to shoot them while they were still happy – well, we’ve probably all felt like that at one time or another.           Certain other nuggets of advice, on the other hand...

To write is one thing. To cast spells another. How to do it? Aged three years old, I used to tell stories to the children next door, weaving fantasies by means of my imagination. Those children were big ones who went to school and could read and write - but they’d line up on their side of the wall to ask what happened next. They were desperate to know but couldn’t for reasons I didn’t understand figure it out themselves. It fell to me - the little squirt peering over her garden wall - to tell them. There’s a knack to casting spells over the imagination. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. Not everyone can do it. But there are a greater number of people who can than do , and it’s not just the hard work, time and effort required that puts people off. It takes a supreme act of self-confidence to believe that the stories going on inside your head are of interest to anybody else. At three I never questioned that they were, but at nine - when I started my first few secret stories -...