Authors Electric

What’s it like to be at the heart of Hell?   Very hot, in most people’s minds. Unbearably hot. The hottest and fieriest part of a mythical world in which the wicked are burnt forever in punishment for their misdeeds. Dante Alighieri Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong, according to Dante Alighieri, whose first part of The Divine Comedy , The Inferno , is an imaginary descent through all the nine circles of Hell. Not about the wicked being punished - that’s non-negotiable - nor about the parts of Hell that do rage with fire (hence the modern use of Inferno to describe such terrible disasters as Grenfell Tower); but about the centre of Hell itself, the lowest circle in which the wickedest souls of all are punished. They are the traitors: betrayers of family, country, guests, benefactors and finally, God himself. There is no heat of passion in their crimes, only cold, ruthless calculation; their punishment is to be frozen forever in a vast, desolate, treeless pl...

Gilgamesh, the Babylonian king, back from the underworld,  on the wall of an eponymous Indian-chic eatery in London. "For the record," used to mean on paper. Now, not so much. I mused on this while going over one of my favorite books on writing, Negotiating With the Dead , by the grand dame of dark irony and literary feminism, Margaret Atwood . I'm wary of the hidden traps awaiting all writers - the beguiling allure of presumed permanence, the fantasy of fame, the chimeras of book covers, notices, prizes, and reviews, of writing for posterity, of measuring oneself against what's gone before, of wondering if I have anything to say. Comes with the territory, says Ms. Atwood. Towards the end of her memoirist exploration, she makes her hypothesis plain: " all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring s...

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...

          Someone once said that the invention of electric light spelt the end of the ghost story.  And I see what she or he meant.  After all, the invention of the mobile phone has led to a significant increase in the number of fictional locations where you can't get a signal.  Progress seems inimical to fiction.            I used to write a lot of ghost stories.  People actually used to refer to me as 'Ah, Dennis Hamley, the ghost story writer.' It's the genre which taught me how to write short stories.  The light was definitely switched on as I wrote them but then there were no mobiles to make what was a 'present day' story when I wrote it, credible for today's readers.  Even so, I'm making an ebook selection of those of mine which I think may be worth resurrecting. They appeared in a variety of books, starting with a collection The Shirt off a Hanged Man's B...