Authors Electric

Sometimes being a writer is like being on the wrong side of a door, a glass door, that offers tantalising glimpses of the world on the other side.   When I was young, I just broke through it using whatever was at hand; determination, energy and ignorance mainly which, correctly wielded, are powerful tools. These days I peer through the misted glass, admiring the scenery. I go away and rifle through my office drawers. I find several dried up felt tip pens, a broken biro, a usb that no longer works and an aged roll of cellotape which appears to have no end. A sensible woman would throw them out, but this one observes that none of these dispiriting objects resembles a key and closes the drawer. The door waits.       On the other side, a dramatic storm is brewing. The sky is charcoal black and, as I watch, white lightning forks. Its afterburn dazzles me and I blink it away. I hope whoever lives there is safe: I have not met them yet, but I would care about the...

I posted about writing some poems for my sister's exhibition a couple of months ago and I thought you might like to know that the exhibition is currently on show in the Manning gallery in NSW The paintings are spectacular, luminous and mysterious and I am in awe of Laura's achievement. I only wish I could see them in the flesh. Am I embarrassed by my poems? A little. They are journeymen work and I am very aware of it. The exhibition called 'Flux' is about 'moments of transition, often uncomfortable moments between states and worlds. The recurrent motif of the waterfall, symbolising in its perpetual motion life and renewal, is juxtaposed with human figures, finite, and vulnerable. The narrative nature of these works hints at our fragile relationship with the natural world, with which we are often at odds.' Ekphrastic poems are difficult things and I suppose what I was trying to avoid was any description of the work on the basis that you don't tell and...

I grew up in Lancashire but every now and again we would pop into Yorkshire on day trips: Skipton was a favourite for the castle and the shopping, York, especially the museum and, rather less frequently, Howarth. I visited it again recently on a cold wet spring day. I haven't been there for more than thirty years but if felt much the same and the story of the Brontes captured my imagination as it always has. It's a grim location in cold, driving rain, up a steep hill overlooking bleak moorland. The house, though substantial, is a kind of reverse Tardis, smaller than it looks for a large family with servants. You can't help wondering what it was like to live with so little privacy, in that small island of intense creativity where everyone you love dies young. It's a fruitful place for stories. They assault you as you walk around the Parsonage, as you look out at the moor, even as you climb up the main street imagining the trouble of hauling shopping up that incline,...

 When we dreamed of a future with robots, we dreamed by and large of a world where they did the grunt work and we humans had the fun, having the time to explore our creativity. It isn't working out that way. New forms of AI can not only write you an essay on any subject you like but make a passable, if derivative stab at writing poetry, film scripts, stories. I never thought I'd be rendered irrelevant by computers and when I read a computer generated example of Anglo Saxon poetry I panicked.  I am still trying to assimilate what it means and I feel as though the Borg are assimilating me.  In one way this development is not surprising. The concept of super intelligent machines has been the staple of SF for years and what humans can imagine we often try to create.  We learn by reading, by copying: we emulate forms, emotions and experiences by reading about them. AI can just do it better because it can learn from all and any digitised material. Of course it has never ex...

 I was at the pub in late August with some poet friends berating my lack of creative direction, as I am inclined to do when one of them told me about his personal project to post a 'triadic couplet' a day to social media. Any hint of a challenge and I'm hooked, so I've been writing a six line poem a day ever since. The form is simple, but flexible. There have to be three couplets and rhyme, rhythm, line length is entirely up to you. They are horribly addictive. It’s something I would recommend to anyone in the creative doldrums. Six lines isn’t very much and, as I have imposed no quality control, there is no real pressure to write anything ‘good': I have no poetry reputation to trash.  That said, I’ve been both embarrassed and pleasantly surprised when friends  have told me they are enjoying them. Part of me thinks I would have spent more time on them, if I'd thought people would read them, the more grown up part  reminds myself that no one forced me to foist ha...

 I’m not brilliant at New Year’s resolutions, that is to say, I’m good at coming up with them but incapable of keeping them. I have been promising myself I’d get fit since I was forty.  Last year I downloaded the NHS/BBC coaching app: ‘couch to 5k’ to my phone: obviously I did not open it. I bought fancy trainers (with insoles!) some ridiculous device for strapping a phone to your arm (now lost) and wireless ear buds so that I could follow instruction: I still did not open the app. I even talked to my physio about running (he was disappointingly enthusiastic) No. Still no running happened.    Credit where credit is due, I am unsurpassed at the coach part. I have natural ability in the sloth department. As with running so with writing: yes there too I am excellent at the coach part.    ‘I’m working’ I tell my long-suffering husband as I gaze at the TV with my laptop open on my knee.  ‘I’m actually working’ I say as I stare out of the window sipping coff...

 I have never been a particular Beatles fan. I like their music but  I am too young to have been aware of them in their heyday and too old to have rediscovered them as something extraordinary and inspirational as a younger generation have done. I did however watch 'Get Back' the eight hour documentary that showed them rehearsing for what became their final and very brief live concert on the roof of the 'Apple' building.      It was at once blindingly dull and totally gripping: watching creative people procrastinate, muck about, fail to organise themselves or make any real decisions was like watching my own head in action or rather inaction. Then there were the strange moments when mucking about suddenly transformed into the creation of something. Watching Paul McCartney noodling around on guitar and producing 'Get Back' was electrifying, like watching a familiar sculpture being chiselled into being from raw concrete.    It got me thinking about creati...

 The image of the writer tends to be that of the solitary genius. Maybe George Bernard Shaw springs to mind in his shed that moved to follow the sun?     These embodied stereotypes are often male, hard drinking, melancholic and usually gifted in ways that sets them apart from lesser mortals: excuses are made for horrible behaviour, faults are fondly reframed as idiosyncrasies.   As a female writer, who is not a solitary genius, or indeed a genius at all, I am prone to wondering (usually when I should be writing) if this stereotype holds me back. My red wine intake is perhaps a little too high but I’m generally an optimistic soul and my idiosyncrasies are all reframed as faults.    When we write it is just us and the words on the page, but I don’t know if that makes the experience unique or even that solitary. We are often not alone in person. Writers I know write in coffee shops, on kitchen tables around the detritus of family life, on packed trains an...

 I have been teaching again. I talk a lot about brevity. I go on (at some length) about being succinct, getting to the point, not getting bogged down in needless waffle, unnecessarily verbose syntactical constructions and mindless repetition.   I am not someone who has ever found myself hidebound by my own advice, but lately I have been writing poetry and I now discover that I find a thirty two line sestina too prolix. When I move on to writing a story, I am hacking back so much that I think I am in negative word counts. Perhaps if I carry on this way I may dispense with words altogether and simply write: '?'  I am sure it is temporary and I will recover my appetite for verbosity shortly. In the meantime: '?'

  Recently someone asked what books I would recommend to someone intending to write fiction. I am a little ashamed to confess that I never read anything about writing before I started writing - it never occurred to me to do so. Looking back that seems both stupid and perverse and also entirely in character.  There is an awful lot to be said for standing on the shoulders of giants, but all my life I have specialised in grubbing around in the shadows at their feet  messing up and making do, attempting to reinvent the wheel by trial and error. I know this isn't an intelligent approach. I've never learned to cook either in spite of the fact that I do a lot of it. I hate following recipes so my cooking is hit or miss and not infrequently a bit of both in a curate's egg kind of way. I am at a loss to explain this idiocy even to myself. I could have saved so much time and my family so many terrible culinary experiences if only I'd taken the time to master a couple of basic tec...

  So, it’s marking time for the Creative Writing courses I teach ie peak chocolate eating time.  In many ways I think the feedback part of any course is the most useful: the moment when students show tutors what they can do and what they have learned, and tutors discover whether our words of wisdom have made any impact. I am not going to try to take credit for the work of those with natural talent who need no help from me, but I have come to realise that there are others whose writing ‘journey’ may be shortened or eased by the right comment at the right time. I just wish it were easier to find that right comment.   It is all too easy to forget the vulnerabilities of other people, to remember that even the most confident, gifted people still need to be treated with careful consideration, that no one takes criticism easily and that making it useful and palatable is a gift that is all too rare. I am not going to lie, I  have often got it wrong.   Like so many ...

 There is something about the turn of the year. It's a midpoint a moment that hangs between. This particular solstice has been  a particularly odd one in a year where the beginning was lost to lockdown and there is no certainty that the year's end might not deliver more of the same. It's a kind of limbo for all of us. We are caught between pessimism and optimism, between fear of the virus and a desperation to return to some kind of normality. This new world that is emerging isn't quite the same as the old one. Perhaps we have a greater sense of the fragility of things, the speed with which shops can empty and hospitals become overrun; the ease with which we can drop certain social contacts and the pain the loss of others causes. Even if we have escaped personal loss, we have all lost quite a lot. Everything is ever so slightly out of joint and old certainties now seem contingent though on what I couldn't say.  One thing that I have lost is certainty. In the 'bef...

  I have a confession. Sometimes I change my mind. Not about big things: I still think Brexit a terrible idea, I still think marrying my husband was a great one, but on smaller issues I like to try things out. I like to try a new idea for fit, challenge it then move on.  My hair is a case in point. I have a lot of ideas about it - most of them terrible. At one time or another I have tried out most cuts, hairstyles and colours: waist length to super short crop, curly perms, root perms and ringlets, bobs, shags, page boys, the Purdy, the Farah Fawcett flick, the Jennifer Aniston layered thing, even (whisper it) a mullet. (Thankfully, most photographic evidence has been lost.) I've been several shades of  blonde, red, brown, grey and latterly lilac.  I've never been tempted by cosmetic surgery but hair grows back, most mistakes can be fixed. So, finally, I come to my point: my approach to hair is very much my approach to editing. You can mess up a lot in writing, but yo...

 It is a year since I had Covid and this time last year I wrote this:  'I suppose I should write something funny about working in isolation. To be honest I have  been ill for most of it so far – not desperately-not-breathing ill, more fall- asleep-in-the- afternoon- blancmange- brain kind of ill, which has been almost restful.'   A couple of days later I was able to go out and wrote this: After a fortnight of quarantine I wake to a different world the air is clean and no planes plough their  white furrow across the blue sky. I buy a coffee ( takeaway) and it tastes like my first, a sweet butter- fest of croissant is the best I ever had. I say hello to everyone I meet,  ‘It’s still London’ my daughter says as though I’ve moved from sick bed to dotage but this is not the London that I know. Along the silent tow path people smile I wave at a toddler on Richmond Green her startled mother laughs surprise and beams. And this  Everything is growing wildl...

 So, this blog was going to be the sad end of year reflection on a year of Covid, of the last year in which all of Europe was still  ours to explore at will. I went to Paris at the end of February as the world woke up to virus and I went to Venice post Covid in the early summer when, briefly, the world opened up again: memories to hold on to.  This year has been about hanging on. I wrote a poem everyday through lockdown - hanging on to creativity and small pleasures: the birdsong in the garden, sunlight striping the floor, walks with a friend and wine -  probably too much wine. This year has been about hanging on to connections, contriving safe ways to meet family and friends. We hung on to Christmas by having it outdoors in November in a festive gazebo. I have decided to hang on to  59, though my transition into young old age was marked memorably and well with a walk in the park and champagne, I think I'll celebrate it again next year - when I may be able to se...

As I get older, I realise, as I’m sure we all do, that our biggest battles tend to be with ourselves. I am not going to run myself down ( I’ve given that up.) There are some things I do easily and well, but my kindest supporter would have to admit that I am not a person who keeps track of things I don't care about. I can rarely find a matching pair of socks, am as likely to have five new tubes of toothpaste as none and have run out of space for notebooks I never use. I am a restless kind of writer, inclined to get excited by something new only to abandon it for a better idea.          Anyway, the upshot of this character flaw is that I don't keep track of my own writing very efficiently. (Don't worry I am very efficient with other people's)   Last week, I found a whole cache of poems I'd forgotten I’d written and I’ve lost count of novels I have written but done nothing with, or ideas I have come up with but never worked on.      My mai...

Staring into my screen in hope rather than expectation.  I suppose I should write something funny about working in isolation. To be honest I have been ill for most of it so far – not desperately-not-breathing ill, more fall- asleep-in-the-afternoon- blancmange- brain kind of ill, which has been almost restful.   Of course I’ve worked at home for years and, although I like going out as much as the next person and probably more than many, I have no problem with the weird world of home working. I feel a bit ashamed that I’ve never learned a language, become amazing at yoga or found out how to cook sixty tasty things with pasta and tinned beans, instead I’ve just quietly been battling my own inertia for years.   My top tip for home working? Chill. Don’t worry about it. The world does not end if you are still working in your pjs at lunchtime. I’ve always regarded the relaxed sartorial standards of home working as one of its greatest perks. If I’m not in pj...