Authors Electric

  For a writer, sound is finicky. It’s difficult to describe in words, let alone render onto the page. Cliches abound. Babbling brooks, birdsong, a lover’s sigh. And yet, to reach for that sensory detail of sound can make or break a piece of writing. Think of how we feel when robbed of our sense of hearing in real life. We believe ourselves to be isolated. We’re suddenly unable to use any of our remaining senses to perceive the world around us. To craft a compelling piece of writing, it pays to appeal to all five senses. Not just sound but also taste, touch, sight and smell . And wouldn’t you know it? Sound can serve many purposes. Setting For example, sound is a way to set the writer’s stage just as a movie soundtrack warns you when something bad’s about to happen. Some noises belong to a specific time and place. Think of the sound of a thousand vuvuzelas at full blast during a soccer match. Just as the idea of a packed sports arena seems far-fetched in these...

On the road sounds mythic, doesn't it? Think about Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Or, if you've been binge-watching old movies these days, you'll know all about Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on the road to some place exotic. Writing while on the road is a whole other ball of wax. Could I do it? Would I do it? These were the questions that haunted me as we set off on our 7 month long journey. I tried to prepare myself. Uploaded a handful of works-in-progress. Made sure my devices would store everything into the cloud. Resigned myself to the fact that I could not write with pen and paper while on the road. Typing with two thumbs was what I had to do. I wanted to produce something more than What I Did on my Summer Holiday. In short, I was aiming to write new fiction. Now you want to know: did I? Shrines for your Domestic Wishes by Marcia Espinosa. Photo credit: Karen Kao   Reading on the Road For me, reading leads to writing. Of course, every writer does a c...

Since 2007 I've been lucky enough to be a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.    It sounds very grand, but is really just one of the most wonderful safety-nets any writer can have. The RLF has been around for nearly three hundred years, helping writers in need, including many of the most famous - like Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Dylan Thomas.  It has also supported the bereaved families of authors such as Robert Burns. It relied on charitable donations, but things changed when one of its former recipients, A.A. Milne, left the RLF the copyright of his Winnie the Pooh books. The sale of some of these rights to Disney in 2001 allowed the Fund to support writers in a much more imaginative way. Fellowships were created in a number of universities which then provided a two way benefit;  the university got a professional author to advise its students on the art of writing and the author received financial support for a set period of time. It w...

I'm in New Zealand at the moment, visiting relatives and friends and re-visiting much loved locations. It's a weird sensation being in a place where I've spent so much time over the years, but yet can never properly belong. There's a sense of both homecoming and exile. Janet Frame Janet Frame, one of New Zealand’s best-known writers, wrote that ‘All writers are exiles wherever they live . . . and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.’*1  Perhaps this is because, as writers, we have to stand outside our own experience and look at it objectively in order to write about it. We're always trying to get back to the 'lost land', those moments experienced and gone, at the core of our imaginative lives. But many of us are also physical exiles. Few people live in the place where they were brought up and the moment you move away from your native territory and look at it from the outside things will never be the same again.  Your mind is alwa...

I've always thought about things in terms of colours - the days of the week came up technicolour even as a child - Saturday was white, Sunday pink, Monday a kind of dirty beige, Tuesday blue, Wednesday green, Thursday grey and Friday black. When I was very small, four or five, I used to have nightmares that were all colour and sound.  Purple was a particularly awful screech that went straight through every nerve like finger nails on glass.  I've never been able to stand purple since. Words, like sounds, have colours too, mostly - though not always - associated with their meanings and images.  The word 'home' comes up a kind of warm pink (psychologists please don't bother to comment!), 'trunk' is brown unless it belongs to an elephant, 'harmony' is blue - a kind of lavender blue - 'excitement' a kind of electric blue, and if you just said 'velvet' to me without qualifying the noun I'd hear a rich medieval red. The ul...

The short list for the BBC National Short Story Award has just been announced and it's a shocker!  There are no men on it... ( David Gilmour take note)  At £15,000 this is one of the most valuable prizes in literature, and it emphasises the short story's status as a literary art form.  The high value we place on the short story is a big contrast with its lack of appeal as a commercial publishing prospect.  Fewer and fewer publishers are accepting them and then only as a gesture towards their best-selling authors.  Newspaper and magazine outlets have also dwindled. But, readers like short stories and writers like writing them.  The result is a flourishing Indie-publishing scene for short fiction - not just in book form, but also in E-zines and blogs and Facebook groups.  People are reading Flash fiction on their mobile phones and downloading stories onto their I-pads from sites where you can read any kind of fiction from erotic to murderous, ...

Amazon 0689836368  Recently I've been asked to narrate one of the story-apps I'm doing with Flying Books. The last time I used a mic was at the launch of FOR MARITSA WITH LOVE  amazon.co.uk/dp/0689836368 and on that occasion I nearly wrecked it, so I regard the things with great caution. I don't have a mic on my computer, so we bought a tiny clip-on one. It was strange to be doing a reading without a visible audience. Now, don't misunderstand - I have always read aloud - for me, it's an essential part of working - but it's a private thing, and I hate having anyone around while I'm doing it. Reading finished work to an audience is something else. It's a special kind of sharing, and audience feedback is an essential part of it. A formal reading with a mic, pausing briefly for each page turn, has been a curious experience, and I still haven't got it right - I was told it had too much echo, so I may have to give up and hand over to one of their pro...

On the 9th of January it will be the 90th anniversary of the death of Katherine Mansfield - one of the icons of 20th century literature.  She died from tuberculosis, a couple of months after her 34th birthday, leaving behind 4 collections of short stories and a huge mass of unpublished journals, letters and fragments of fiction. Strange things happen after the death of an author.  They either sink gracefully from view, or their work develops a life of its own, marching forward into a future the author could never have imagined, read by people in bizarrely different circumstances, finding meanings they never consciously intended.  In Katherine Mansfield’s case, her husband, the editor and critic John Middleton Murry, was so full of guilt at the way he’d treated her when she was alive, he made it his life’s work to preserve and publish everything she’d ever written. His obsession with her ruined his three subsequent marriages and created a poisonous legacy for his...

A few years ago my career as a writer was in crisis.  I was nearing the end of a long biography of Katherine Mansfield and my publisher became one of the first victims of the economic crash.  They were taken over by another publisher, my editor left, and there was a new editorial policy that didn’t include literary biography.  A significant number of other publishers made similar decisions. Then my agent went on maternity leave and announced she was ‘slimming down’ her list.  As an author without a contract I was gracefully dropped.   Enquiry letters to other agents went unanswered.   Worse, Virago told me they wouldn’t be reprinting my most popular book A Passionate Sisterhood, even though it was still selling a respectable number of copies. It felt as if my life as a writer was over.  No one wanted me.  The feeling of despair was terrible.  My partner N,  who’s a resourceful, practical kind of bloke, said ‘Well, why don’...