Authors Electric

It’s week 16 of the 52 poems challenge (write a poem a week for a year). ‘How’s it going?’I hear you cry. A bit mixed, if I’m honest. The idea is to spend AT LEAST an hour a week reading poetry (no hardship!) and at least an hour writing. I also had what I thought was the bright idea of keeping a week ahead to allow for unforeseen spanners in the works. I still think it is a good idea, except that it makes me panic if I can’t keep it up. Not so good. Each week, there is a theme, a writing prompt and some illustrative works – ie poems on the given theme by established poets – all to get the juices flowing. Sometimes the illustration poem is so good that it’s hard not to get discouraged from the start, but I’ve been trying to counter that by heading off in as different a direction as I can. So, for the ‘Weather’ poem (Ted Hughes ‘Wind, Anon ‘Westron Wynd’, John Donne ‘The Sunne Rising’) mine is a first person comment from a snowflake. I have no idea whether it’s good, bad or indi...

I have known what it was like to be on the front pages of newspapers, or the subject of a double-page spread inside the Independent .  Television interviews, radio shows – my 15 minutes of fame.  It was fantastic being chauffeur driven across London, with a huge bouquet of lilies and roses on my lap, to a champagne reception. The reviews were glowing and I’ll never forget the experience of walking into WH Smith and seeing my book, in hardback, at number 8 in the best-seller lists.  The six figure sums of money being bandied about were head-turning. ‘You’ll never have to worry about money again in your life,’ my agent said.  I should have known! The doomed hardback It was a story of luck and also of danger. I was commissioned to write a biography of Catherine Cookson just after she died, for a very modest sum. The estate wanted a northern author and, as a respected literary biographer, they thought I was eminently suitable.  But I’m also a natural detec...

Terry Pratchett used to work on six large computer monitors mounted in a bank in front of him.  Each one had a different screen - Google, 24 hr news, a couple of books in various stages and anything that interested him and was relevant to his work. He loved that inter-action, being connected to a wider world than his small study. Who needs the internet with a view like this from the window? Other writers find they can only work on a computer not connected to the internet.  Best-selling author Margaret Forster was even more extreme, but not unusual, in not working on a computer at all. Pen and paper are still very much in fashion and there are a number of studies that seem to show that writing by hand is not only beneficial, but can be more creative than tapping a keyboard. I don’t think I’m alone in sometimes finding the relentless white noise of social media a burden.  Publishers expect you to blog and tweet and answer emails pretty sharpish. If you self-publish ...

It isn't just politicians and celebrities who have to think about their image - if you're publishing a book you have to be very conscious of the way it's going to be marketed.  Your cover, front and back - the design and the blurb - are the advertisement for the content and it has to be exactly right, otherwise the reader will feel cheated. My latest book is a travel journal; part memoir, part social history, part adventure - an absolute nightmare to pin down. Finding a cover has been very difficult.  Poor Neil, my designer, has been dragged from photo-shop to photo-shop, figuratively speaking, in an effort to realize the vague image that I had in my mind. Several early sketches were rejected by a daughter in publishing sales, who thought it looked too like a novel. 'The cover has to say what the book's about,' she said sternly.  So I gave Neil another brief and some images of what's in the book and he came up with two covers that I put up on Facebook for...

Someone once said to me, after a talk at a literary festival, ‘You’re so privileged to have a platform to reach people’.  It took me by surprise because I hadn’t thought that being a writer would result in a moral responsibility to save the world!  That being published was a privilege that might give rise to this kind of obligation hadn’t surfaced in my mind. I've thought about it quite a lot since then. As published authors, what we write is read by thousands of people whose lives we touch in unknown ways. That chance encounter with a reader made me aware not only that what I write can affect people’s lives, cheer them up, entertain, provide an escape route,  but also that we do, as writers, have a unique opportunity to share experiences and ideas that might help and inspire people. I’ve recently paid another visit to the National Centre for Children’s Books - Seven Stories in Newcastle - where they currently have an exhibition of books designed to carry important mes...

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...

This is my journey to the Edge of the World, where Captain Cook accidentally stumbled into Haida Gwaii while he was looking for the Pacific exit of the fabled North West Passage.  Beyond this expanse of sand is the Pacific Ocean - the biggest mass of water on the planet;  to the north is Alaska and the North Pole. “Where your world ends, ours begins” Haida saying For months I’d been feeling depressed, anxious and powerless. There seemed to be no solution to the perfect storm of economic and environmental chaos that was (and still is) approaching. My own personal life felt just as stormy and unsolvable. But at the moment when I felt most depressed, I read a book by an American poet called Robert Bringhurst. It was called A Story as Sharp as a Knife . At first what drew me to the book was the discussion about narrative. I’m a writer, and I’m fascinated by narrative. Story telling is fundamental to the human psyche, even our brains are structured to construct narrative...

It's 3 years now since the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) first stormed the closed doors of the London Book Fair and since then the dust has begun to settle.  Although there still seems to be some bewilderment at the change, authors are now firmly a part of one of the biggest book events in Europe.  It seems incredible that it was ever otherwise.  How can you have books without authors? It's as though the mainstream publishing industry has got into the habit of regarding us at best as inconvenient amateurs, at worst just the chicken that lays the egg. Just one of the halls at Olympia. This year, for the first time, I was able to go along and I had the most incredible experience.  Held at Olympia, the Fair is absolutely vast.  So big that I got lost on a regular basis, despite having a map, and on Day One I had three attempts to find the right exit before being escorted out by a burly bloke in a Book Fair T-shirt.  All the major publishers (an...