Authors Electric

In the olden days, when typewriters and carbon copies and sending everything off by post was the way things were done, getting an agent was comparatively easy. It wasn’t something you could do by simply pressing a computer key; it took time, effort, nice plastic folders and a lot of typewriter ribbons. Not as many people bothered. I sent three short stories off to an agent, and was taken on straight away. She wanted me to write a book and so, full of confidence and the conviction that I could do something really different I went for speculative fiction, and my main character was an intelligent vegetable that could move and was used as a form of transport. I probably had some sort of plot, but I can’t remember it now. Astonishingly, she didn’t like it. I didn’t learn my lesson because, many years later, although I’d had a lot of short stories published and several radio plays broadcast I was still trying to do something radical. That time I set it 5 million years in the future; evolutio...

The exercise I used to set my students at the start of a new year was diary writing. The first person is always a good place to begin as you don’t have to worry about how many heads you can see inside. Of course, you can’t kill off the main character (although there are various ways of doing it, but please don’t). Having more constraints, however, as in poetry, is actually a help rather than a hindrance. Tutors who say, write about whatever you like, are usually in for a disappointment. The big difference in my homework, though, was that I always threw in a curved ball. It could be, write as a pirate. A jackdaw. A palm tree. The trick is to understand the limitations of your subject, and to think the way they might. So I thought I’d try three different personas here, and see what happened. Rover’s diary. Monday   It’s raining, so we just had a short walk round the block. It’s a good job I can identify people by smell as they all look the same these days, with those silly ...