Authors Electric

A couple of weeks ago, I took a day off. The kids were at school, so it was just me and my wife. We popped into Edinburgh for the day and spent a fascinating couple of hours at the National Gallery exploring the Ray Harryhausen exhibition. We both grew up with these movies, so there was a distinct air of nostalgia as we wandered about. All the classic models were there - Pauline was especially delighted to see BoBo the owl (from Clash of the Titans) whereas I was more interested in the skeleton warriors from Jason and the Argonauts (I guess that shows where my interests lie…), but even more interesting was the back-story behind the movies. There was a whole series of sketches and drawings showing the development of the models, and you could trace the development of the idea from initial concept to finished creature, including all the problems encountered and how they were solved. I was most taken with the engineering drawings, showing how even the direction a bolt was fitted was ...

I cannot quite believe I am writing this – I have finished a book! Writing one, I mean. It’s been a while – around five years since I wrote ‘The End’ on anything longer than a few pages. I’ve been writing all that time – I never really stopped – but I haven’t been finishing anything much, and my definition of a writer is not so much ‘Someone who writes’ as ‘Someone who finishes writing something’. I’ve mentioned this before and don’t want to bore you with it all again, but five years ago my writing career, if I can call it that, took a huge knock when a publisher commissioned me to write a series of children’s books and then, after I’d done quite a lot of work, pulled the rug. It probably shouldn’t have upset me as much as it did, but it did. It knocked my confidence, such as it was, clean out of me. At around the same time my father died, and although losing him was much, much worse, the whole thing got mixed up in my mind and somehow made it impossible for me to write prop...

Earlier this month, Alice Jolly’s interesting post for AE on ‘voice in the novel' gave me so much food for thought that, rather than posting a brief comment, I thought I’d contribute to the discussion more usefully by writing a post from my own perspective. Having published The Physic Garden , a first person narration historical novel (although not my first historical novel) a couple of years ago, I then found myself contemplating the challenge of writing a new historical novel, more or less set in the same period, late 18th and early 19th century Scotland, for the same publisher. But I knew almost immediately that this wouldn’t be a first person narration – although it could have been - and this post will attempt to explore some of the reasons for my decisions. I’m generally comfortable with first person narration because – wearing my other hat as a playwright – I’ve written a number of dramatic monologues: vivid first person narratives, with a strong voice and a strong...

Oh, it happens, and it’s horrible. It’s like being in a maze when you can’t find the way out, and you keep passing the same point over and over again. Nine times out of ten there will be something wrong with the last section you wrote. There could be any number of issues here, but usually it’s just one, especially if you have an idea of where the plot is going. You need to re-read what you’ve written, as objectively as possible. This means making a note of the timeline – can everyone get to where they’re meant to be in the time you’ve given them to do it? It may mean making a map of the terrain. Are the characters in the right places? But the most likely glitch of all is that someone has behaved out of character. They simply would not have done or said something or other. Have a good hard look at each character, and the motivation for their behaviour. People (or animals, or mythical beasts!) don’t do things for no reason. Some characters seem to come from nowhere. Others ha...