Authors Electric

  In Part 1, we survived the history of feuds and rivalries among writers, the literary minefield of conflicting egos and ambitions. Is it possible, we wondered, for even the strongest alliance to avoid ending in flames. Young Leverett Butts approached Richard Monaco, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, as a fan of the older author's Parsival series and entered into a creative relationship and partnership that lasted for over a decade. Today LB answers questions about the power of becoming both student and teacher. And the importance of choosing the right mentor. 1 .  First Models: All writers start with a model in mind—someone whose work deeply resonates with them. Many even attempt to emulate that writer before finding their own vision and voice. Who was your first model? When I first seriously started writing, I was greatly inspired by John Irving and Robert Penn Warren. A lot of my earlier attempts at "literary" fiction draw deeply from those two writers. As I began to write mo...

At the start of December 2019, I gave myself a gift of learning. I'd seen numerous ads for MasterClass while searching for interesting gifts for the holiday season.  If you're unfamiliar with MasterClass, it's a streaming platform of online courses that started in 2015 with a simple pitch: Famous people teach you about the thing that made them famous. At the time, the courses that interested me most were from writers: Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell, Joyce Carol Oates, just to name a few. MasterClass, however, includes instructors from all walks of life—from Dr. Jane Goodall who teaches Conservation to Helen Mirren who teaches Acting to Annie Leibovitz who teaches Photography.  You can either purchase a specific course along with its instructional videos and workbooks, or buy an annual membership which gives you unlimited access to all the classes, including new ones that are added during the year.  I decided to pick up an annual subscription and a second ...

There are a great many pages medically analysing how smells will conjure memories, both good and bad. Entire industries have been built around this connection as perfumers concoct fragrances that seek to convey a vast array of emotions and feelings: from desire to power, vitality to relaxation. And of course the sense of smell is inextricably linked with that of taste.  We each have many thousands of  taste  buds to detect the  five basic sensations : sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami (word for savoury taste distinct from pure saltiness).  We can google just about everything, and imagine how something feels and to a lesser extent hazard a guess at a flavour. Invoking a scent/odour/smell/pong or any other word of choice is often overlooked when writing.   There are experiments in theatres which started some years ago with cloth pads soaked in oils and the odours wafted around by fans and became more sophisticated machinery (we’ve all had exp...

The poet M R peacock has talked about the creative process as arising from that part of the brain where dreams are made, and she suggested that calm and quietness are prerequisites for both. That seems to me more like day-dreaming than the dreams that come in sleep: day-dreams, the slipping of a cog in the brain towards unfocussedness,   letting thoughts drift as they will. I’ve found that story or poetry ideas sometimes float through in that pleasant, what-looks-like-idle, state. They may just be fragments that float off again and never make it into wholeness, but occasionally they grow and settle into something worth working on. My children’s story Goose Anna came from that out-of-focus state on a long motorway drive (I was a passenger, I hasten to add) with a soft-toy goose on the back seat, and picture book The Crows’ Nest formed from a chilled-out evening (with wine) in a friend’s garden, half-listening to crows gossiping in nearby trees. Days out in the wi...

I have met a lot of writers. Like real, published-by-big-houses, award-winning, best-selling novelists. Writers you know, writers that your kids have tests on, and writers that your kids read to avoid studying for tests on the writers your kids have tests on. Writers with Wikipedia pages I once had dinner with Joseph Heller because I told him at a signing that I was writing my Master's thesis on his work. I had to explain to Kurt Vonnegut at the same dinner that no, it wasn't because  Slaughterhouse-Five wasn't good enough for me. I didn't have a camera, so this picture of them with their wives (from an entirely unrelated event) will have to suffice. I used to play D&D with a World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award winner. I correspond regularly with another Bram Stoker Award winner. I've eaten several lunches with T.E.D. Klein . I used to work with the guy who wrote the Wishbone books . I am also good friends with both Kelley Wilde and our own Reb MacR...

This is a bit of an experiment. I’ve written and published before now about my mental health, including a post on Authors Electric a few months ago about anxiety and panic attacks. I’ve mentioned my recurrent depression and I may even have summarised the effects it has on me – but I’ve never published anything I actually wrote (or tried to write) while depressed. There are good reasons for that – one of which being that it can be bloomin’ difficult, if not impossible, to write anything at all when depressed. It’s certainly not something I’d advise anyone in that condition to try – not unless they really want to, and feel that it might help. The last thing someone with depression needs is another thing that he or she ‘should’ do. Depression is enough of a burden and a severe taskmaster without adding to its demands. But this time, recently, I wanted to write. Perhaps I wasn’t as bad as I’ve sometimes been. Certainly I seem to be coming out of it, thanks partly to my trusty...