Authors Electric

  Sometimes the sheer number of books is overwhelming.   There’s all the famous old stuff, the canon of English Literature and stuff that if it isn’t qite canon so many people have read, then all the new stuff, the prize winning stuff and the stuff written by my friends which is sometimes the same stuff. There’s all the stuff I just love to read because it takes me somewhere else and all the stuff you can buy for a song at a charity shop, the free books on kindle and the not-very-expensive-under- the-price -of -a -glass -of -wine books that you can have right now on your phone. There is such a morass of material, the question has to be asked: why write another one? I mean perhaps some people think they might write another book that is unlike any that has ever been written before, that says something that has never been said in words never before used to quite that effect. Maybe some people trust that their book will join the new canon of great works of the twenty first century...

 Sometimes writing fiction feels pointless. Sometimes what is going on in real life eclipses fiction, so that making things up can feel like the most cowardly kind of escapism, a failure to engage with reality.  In Covid lockdown, writing poetry about the pandemic made sense because, Downing St apart, we were all in it together.  Not all of us suffered, but we all feared suffering and for a time, when it seemed that the virus was as likely to affect all of us equally, that seemed to legitimise writing about it. It was everyone's story even for those of us not on the front line or in hospital. I felt entitled, obliged even to write about it.     The war in Ukraine feels different. I don't know where the line lies between imaginative empathy and exploitation.  This is not my suffering and dipping my metaphorical pen in someone else's blood feels inappropriate. Let those who are living it, write it, record it, rework it into art or poetry or propaganda as...

One of the elements of writing that often causes the most trouble for students (and for me) is, what everyone now calls: 'point of Cover: Marina Esmeraldo view.' I mean, I’ve been doing this a while now so I don’t usually switch between character perspectives accidentally. I do, however, still struggle to enter the mind and milieu of my protagonist as completely as I need to. I find my own characteristic verbal tics turn up whether I’m supposed to be a wolf, a Saxon warrior or a teenage time traveller none of whom should sound like a middle aged white woman.  It takes considerable effort on my part to imagine being ‘other’ and to enter the linguistic and perceptual world of this ‘other’ mind. I have no tips to offer. Sorry. I approach it in my usual bumbling irrational way, working it out by trial and error. Sometimes I never get there and I have at least two unpublished novels on my hard drive which are narrated by entirely the wrong person in completely the wrong wa...