Authors Electric

                                                      A Chain Reaction How our interests define us. I was thinking about the horrors of war, the reality of which is all around us on the news at present and briefly interrupted by a worldwide lament for the death of Pope Francis. This year is the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War with Victory in Europe (VE Day) and Victory over Japan (VJ Day) approaching, and I have been reading recently  Question 7  by Richard Flanagan, who was a Booker Prize Winner in 2014 for his novel,  The Narrow Road to the Deep North , a book which concerned the horror of the Japanese military’s treatment of prisoners during The Second World War. The author had been inspired to write the novel after listening to his father’s tale of experiences in a Japanese POW camp and fictionalising them. I h...

In this post, International Writers' Collective teacher Karen Kao talks about what historical fiction is, the importance of research and how to weave actual historical events and figures into your story as well as the nitty-gritty of description, dialogue, and setting in a historical context. I hate history. I’ve no head for dates or names. And yet, my debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle , is a work of historical fiction. It is one of a planned quartet of interlocking novels set in Shanghai. My inspiration comes from my father’s stories of growing up in Shanghai. Of the uncle who gambled away his fortune to feed his opium addiction. Of the aunt who became a dance hall hostess to send herself to school. Maybe you, too, have an illicit bit of family history you’d love to share. Or, you’re obsessed with a particular historical time and place whose story is screaming to be told. In that case, you can use all the craft elements we teach at the International Writers...

  I have just read First Person,  Richard Flanagan's new novel about a hungry young novelist struggling with ghostwriting the life of an impossible con-man for a demanding publisher. It captures exactly the sort of despair we have all faced at times when trying to make a living in the creative world. I think perhaps texts such as this should be recommended reading on any vocational creative writing course and in every art school, (and every drama school come to that), in order to test the mettle of the would-be creatives. I remember as a teenager reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell and Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham and being both excited and appalled. Excited by the prospect of escaping an ordinary life in order to be a great poet/artist like the heroes of these books, and simultaneously appalled by the poverty and rejection that they have to face as a result of their choices.   If you can read books like these and st...