Authors Electric

This past month has been quite introspective for me. I’ve been looking back through some of the short stories I’ve written over the past thirty-odd years with a view to seeing if there’s anything in there that still engages me. I will say, I don’t write anywhere near as many shorts as I used to – the books have kind of taken over, there, meaning the time to write something small and self-contained has shrunk – so the majority of them are earlier works. I’m also, for obvious reasons, not revisiting those stories that have been published. I think they can stand on their own merits. This started four or five weeks back, after a conversation with a work colleague who was asking me about writing (surprisingly, not the usual questions about ‘Where do you get your ideas’ and so on). We were discussing how it’s possible to see a writer’s style and voice develop over the years with each book they put out – we started looking at the development of the Harry Potter books, funnily enough, and ...

Some years ago, another writer, whom I respected said to me, “You have a distinct voice.”  She had read a couple of my books, and at the time, I was writing erotic fiction. Her words caught me off guard.  “Oh?” I felt somewhat ambivalent toward her statement. “I guess my writing’s become predictable.”  “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean you have a certain way of telling a story.”  She was offering a compliment, but in that moment, I couldn’t fully appreciate what she was saying. I took it to mean she had read enough of my stories to notice a recurring pattern, a particular style of writing. I filed away her words in my brain, confident I’d eventually understand them more clearly.  To have one’s own style isn’t a bad thing, right?  I’ve been reading erotic fiction for years, so it’s not a stretch to think I’ve adopted stylistic details from authors I’ve admired. At age eleven, I read Pauline Réage’s Story of O . I didn’t understand all of it, but it made...