Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. It is ironic the longest month ever, January, is followed by the shortest, February. Writing wise, it gives me the shortest time to prepare my next author newsletter, due in March, but I discovered long ago the joys of drafting in advance so I add to my draft as the month goes on. I do likewise for my blogs and articles. It takes the pressure off.   I enter a number of reputable flash fiction and short story competitions in the year. It’s fun to do and a great challenge (and I always look for those where it is free or the fee is reasonable).    I’ve found it useful to take a week off any official deadline and make that the day I submit my entry. I pencil into my diary when I need to have my first draft done by, my first edit, my second one, and the final one to check for those pesky typos which have escaped the previous edits. I wish I could say there weren’t any but I’ve found it pays to assume there ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I trust it’s not too late to wish you a Happy New Year. January does seem to go on for ever and ever, amen. There is a wonderful Brian Bilston poem about that ( Mnemonic ), which is worth looking up if you haven’t come across this. It always makes me grin. There is a plus side to January. As the month goes on, we are literally approaching the light. The evenings seem longer (especially noticeable if you are taking the dog out).  I like to write and read a mixture of light and dark stories. In the latter, I want there to be some sense of hope. For light stories, I want some “bite” to them. Humorous stories can make you think while they’re entertaining you.  I prefer my characters to be a mixture of dark and light given nobody is perfect and I don’t like wishy-washy, too good to be true portrayals. I suppose this is why I identify far more with Jo March from Little Women than I do with her sister, Beth. I al...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.  One thing which makes a character, and their story, more real to me is when they have memories. I  think it is a great way to ensure your characters aren’t cardboard cut outs. A character recalling a memory is showing something of themselves, which shows they have more than one dimension. Memories can be played on by the character to generate sympathy. Memories can be used against a character to make them fall into line with what someone else wants - emotional blackmail. Characters can use memories to blackmail others in the more traditional ways too. Sometimes, as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, memories can be used as a tool for redemption. Scrooge didn’t want to face up to his past but until he did, he could not move on.   In The Lord of The Rings, memories dictated what elf leader, Elrond, wanted to happen to the Ring of Power. He knew it was what should have happened before but, due to the weakn...

 Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. We all love stories. The best non-fiction books can read like novels so you could include those here too. But I must admit I have a soft soft for stories in songs and this time of year reminds me of that. Many of the Christmas carols tell the story of the Nativity, taking in different viewpoints. There are carols for the shepherds, the Magi, and even the donkey and the holly and the ivy after all. It was thinking of these that made me consider other songs which are stories. One of my favourites is Up the Junction from Squeeze which is a proper ballad and a heart-wrenching story. Well worth a listen if it’s not one you know. There is a great story structure throughout. And yes, I did guess the ending. I didn’t guess just how poignant it would be. Another favourite of mine is Hazard by Richard Marx. This tells the story of an oddball (his small town suspects him of “not being right”) who is suspected of the disappear...

I’m having a few issues at work at the moment – least said the better, to be honest, but it’s knocked my confidence somewhat and made me think about a lot of things I used to take for granted. Imposter syndrome is hard to deal with and not always helped by other people, and I’m very much a fan of carrots rather than sticks. I consider myself to be an extroverted introvert. I can put on the persona, wear the outfit and act the part when I need to, but in reality, I enjoy my own company and can happily go days without talking to anybody on the rare occasions it’s possible. I have good friends, yes, but I have a tendency to over-analyse everything like most writers do, I guess. I also have a tendency to speak first and think afterwards – and I have an opinion on absolutely  everything , including things about which I know nothing at all. It gets me into trouble. Which makes me think that nobody is truly who they seem, are they? I was out earlier today with Andy and we passed...

I've been home from Malawi for a few weeks now, and a little ebook about my travels is taking shape. At the same time, I've been trying to market a novel. And this has got me thinking. Although the novel was inspired by a vignette I found in the museum in Hokitika, New Zealand, most of it is made up. I had to find characters in my own head. I went through the long process of getting to know them all, how they spoke, why they did what they did. It's a long unravelling - and I loved it. I love the unpicking of a character and throwing them into new places - I have notebooks full of scribbles as I let each character find his or her voice, and only then did I know them well enough to drop them into the novel. Then came the task of inviting the reader to go through a comparable process - of meeting each character, unpicking why they do what they do, even responding on an emotional level. (Looking back, I think there is still one character that I don't know well eno...

I’m often asked how to invent a human character. Of course, you can use someone you know, or a facet of yourself. But sometimes that simply won’t fit, and you’re floundering around for inspiration. Really memorable characters aren’t just about outward appearance, they’re about personality and motivation and idiosyncracies. Appearance is important, though, and we all know that people are meant to grow to look like their dogs… You can be quite subtle about it, or completely blatant, as in this line from my book The Divide : Tansy always reminds me of a stabber-bird, thought Betony, with her long nose and her snaky neck. And it’s fairly clear that this imaginary bird in a magical dimension was based on one from our own world. So here are a few ideas for animals you could use, taken from my own photographs. The crane hawk - an elegant and efficient killer The Gorilla - a family-minded gentle giant The tortoise - a thick-skinned survivor The chamele...

Last month,  I suggested that would-be fiction writers might consider using questions as the point de départ for their stories. I concentrated on ‘who’ and ‘where’ and surmised that, with just those two, it’s possible to create quite a complex, detailed structure. I did, however, begin the blog with comments about a few linguistic tics such as rising terminals and that seemed to exercise the minds of those who responded more than the question of questions. Perhaps the point is so obvious that it’s not worth making. Nonetheless, I shall persist and suggest that this month’s interrogatives, ‘what’ and ‘how’, can take the complexity even further. So here’s Writing 101, part 2 . What? What's going on here? In order to illustrate the flexibility of ‘who’, I stressed that the answer might not be the expected human but an animal or even an inanimate object brought to life for the purposes of a story. The example I chose was a hapless mop and a bucket. Asking ‘who’ gave e...

It's sunny as I write this. I can hear my neighbour cutting her grass. Bees hover on the rosemary by my window. All I want to do, if I'm honest, is to finish this and get out there. To sit in a shady corner with a book and allow the afternoon to pass me by. I recognise that I have an ongoing conversation with the weather. It's not simply that I'm British and we can be obsessed by it. It's that the weather can shape my day. Cold has me huddled indoors, hands curled around a mug of hot tea. The rain - especially if it comes with days of endless grey - leaves me struggling to find the motivation to do anything. Wind - ask any teacher of five-year-olds how she copes with children on a windy day. I know just how those children feel - wind seems to blow through my head leaving me reeling from one idea to another without managing to grasp any of them. I know myself well enough to recognise that there are days when I need to go with the flow of the weather, and others w...

We ask a lot of our characters. Should we ask the same of ourselves? I've just returned from a trip to Malaysia. It's a wonderful, multicultural country with some of the kindest people in the world. But this trip has thrown three significant unexpectednesses at me - just the sort of thing we throw at our characters. Firstly, the weather. Floods kept me from the travelling deep into the rainforest: would I ask my fictional self to get caught in the floods, to wade waste-deep with crocodiles and leeches, in an effort to reach safety? The tail-end of the monsoon continued to ravage the east coast and made reaching an island, with its palm trees and snorkelling, difficult as the ferries were unreliable in the stormy weather. My fictional self would have gone anyway, huddled on the beach with the snakes and monkeys and had sand blown in her eyes. Secondly, the Chinese New Year, a time of glorious celebrations with fireworks and dragons, stretches the public transport system t...

I’ve just released my second Nail Your Novel book. I’ve been promising it for about four years, but finally buckled down, sorted out my scrappy notes and made a plan.  It started as a general book about the craft, drawn from my experiences writing and critiquing. Soon, though, it was so enormous that I had to split it. And then I split it again. Anyway, the first subject that naturally came to mind was characters, and so I’m proud to present Nail Your Novel’s new brother: Bring Characters to Life .  So today I want to talk about characters, but not necessarily the ones in our books. I want to talk about us: the general character of writers. As with all professions, there are predilections and quirks that mean we suit our jobs. But they can also work against us. Writer instinct #1: Passive characters Hands up if you’ve been told off for writing passive main characters. It’s an occupational hazard. Passive main characters are people who run ...

I was particularly taken by Deb’s piece on the themes that ran through her work, and it seemed like an excellent topic to filch. I’ve been lucky enough to talk about it before, at a couple of conferences – one of the things that spurred me to self-publish was the looming 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Songs from the Other Side of the Wal l is essentially about the numerous crises in identity that precipitated (all dressed up in Murakami-esque wrapping), it was important to me to get the book out in 2009. And having done so, I was able to take part in conferences marking the anniversary, combining practical and theoretical approaches to identity. The papers I gave appear as appendices in the paperback edition. The question of how we even begin to discover our place in such a complex world in which apparent polarities pull us from every direction is the thread that runs through everything I write. In The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes , I tackle the issue of the ...