Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos When I started writing seriously many years ago, I read as many author interviews as possible. I still find them engaging and informative.   I love being on both sides of the questioning too as I sometimes appear on other writers’ blogs and regularly interview authors for an online magazine.   Inventing interesting questions to draw the author into conversation is a joy and challenge but this is where being a writer helps. I know what I would want to know and start my questioning from there.   I found it helpful years ago to work out how I would answer questions put to writers should the happy day come around when I became a published author. I found that paid because it helped me get used to the idea of talking about what I write. It does seem an odd thing to do when you start. How are you coming across? When you talk about your characters and stories, does it make sense to those listening? Certain que...

In the couple of weeks leadig up to Christmas, I had a sit-down (virtually, of course) with some writer friends, and we spent quite a lot of time discussing the mechanics of writing. All of us have have recently been working with new writers, trying to help them, and someone (not me, wish I could take the credit for it) thought it would be an idea to get a set of guidelines and tips together, based on things we'd seen and questions we'd had. (Yes, the inevitable question was asked – how do you write a book? My answer was the same as, I suspect, most authors – one word at a time, until you have a lot of them that hopefully forms a coherent text.) What was interesting, though, was the views of some people on the whole process. We started the process of collating this material, but the following is the top 4 things that came up: "I don't rewrite or edit as it spoils the creative flow." This came up several times. Quite simply, I suspect there are few writers, ...