Authors Electric

 The third monthly installment of  our hero's adventures as he dances through the minefields of life and politics. “Mixed bag of responses,” Puppy said as he scrolled through the pollsters’ findings on his phone the day after the program was broadcast. “Almost exactly fifty-fifty.” “Fifty-fifty what?” Teddy dragged his tired eyes up from the blank diary page he had been working on, or at least thinking about. “Well, fifty per cent of the people who watched you on Bake-off thought you were hilarious, and believe you should be allowed to bring your own peculiar brand of gaiety back to Number Ten.” “And the other fifty?” “The other fifty can’t believe the British public ever allowed such a clown to get into Number Ten in the first place.” “Bloody photographers!” Teddy grumbled. “I’m sure they airbrushed that photo to make me look like Coco the Clown.” “Not sure they had to, Mate,” Puppy sighed. “You pretty much did your own flour-based make-up in there. The one thing ...

Writers may come in all sizes and shapes...and some shapes are stranger than others. But in the end they all belong in one of two great camps. FIRST CAMP First off, you have the outliners. Their argument is simple: a  book is a journey and you can't get There till you know every Here on the way. P. G.Wodehouse's outlines ran to to 30,000 words and were done on index cards mounted all over the walls. Horror writer John Saul's outlines may reach a hundred pages while John Grisham's run to fifty. Even Tom Wolfe once lamented that one of his books took a decade to write because, with no outline, he found himself lost. And we can be certain that Virgil had an outline for the Aeneid: an epic divided into two parts of six Books each, with each part containing the same number of lines. SECOND CAMP But the other camp is as large and as loud: non-outliners who insist on going with the flow--letting the book, as it were, write itself...sometimes on rolls of paper...