Authors Electric

A long time ago, when I worked at the BBC, the fridge in the news production room bore a handwritten notice that said: ‘The iceman cometh… and getteth you if you don’t refill the ice tray!’  I recognised the reference (have to admit I have still never seen Eugene O’Neill’s play) and was amused by this way of delivering a message to all those irritating people who return empty ice trays to the freezer.  I assumed, also, that the grammatical howler was deliberate, with ‘getteth’ being merely a nod to ‘cometh’, not that the wag who wrote it genuinely thought this was the way Elizabethan language worked. (For sense it should have read 'and will get you'.) Delicious. Just don't forget to refill the ice tray. Title page of the King James Bible.  That assumption may have been correct then. Or possibly not. It certainly wouldn’t be correct now.  One of the greatest pieces of literature in the English language is the King James Bible. Translated from the Greek, Hebrew and Ara...

To write is one thing. To cast spells another. How to do it? Aged three years old, I used to tell stories to the children next door, weaving fantasies by means of my imagination. Those children were big ones who went to school and could read and write - but they’d line up on their side of the wall to ask what happened next. They were desperate to know but couldn’t for reasons I didn’t understand figure it out themselves. It fell to me - the little squirt peering over her garden wall - to tell them. There’s a knack to casting spells over the imagination. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. Not everyone can do it. But there are a greater number of people who can than do , and it’s not just the hard work, time and effort required that puts people off. It takes a supreme act of self-confidence to believe that the stories going on inside your head are of interest to anybody else. At three I never questioned that they were, but at nine - when I started my first few secret stories -...