Authors Electric

For my first blog with the esteemed writers of Authors Electric, I’d like to share something about myself as a writer. I won’t bore you with my personal history, my likes and dislikes, shoe size, etc. Almost anything you want to know about me is on my website if you’re curious enough (except maybe the shoe size). I’ll address something that is not always evident about most writers, and that is … are they plotters or pantsers? Let me explain the difference. A plotter researches a book before writing it, laying out an overview with major plot points. Plotters know what will happen at the beginning, middle, and end of the book. Character sketches are usually part of the outline. R.L. Stine:   “If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.” John Grisham:   “I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on ...

Writers may come in all sizes and shapes...and some shapes are stranger than others. But in the end they all belong in one of two great camps. FIRST CAMP First off, you have the outliners. Their argument is simple: a  book is a journey and you can't get There till you know every Here on the way. P. G.Wodehouse's outlines ran to to 30,000 words and were done on index cards mounted all over the walls. Horror writer John Saul's outlines may reach a hundred pages while John Grisham's run to fifty. Even Tom Wolfe once lamented that one of his books took a decade to write because, with no outline, he found himself lost. And we can be certain that Virgil had an outline for the Aeneid: an epic divided into two parts of six Books each, with each part containing the same number of lines. SECOND CAMP But the other camp is as large and as loud: non-outliners who insist on going with the flow--letting the book, as it were, write itself...sometimes on rolls of paper...

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’           This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that ...