Authors Electric

A couple of years back I wrote an agony aunt page here on Authors Electric, so this month I thought I’d continue on a similar theme, but more in the spirit of receiving, rather than giving advice out like blue smarties. I mean there’s just so much advice out there, isn’t there? Everywhere you look are helpful people telling you how to do things you never even knew you should be doing! Write what you know! But I’m not an axe-murderer and there are no fairies at the bottom of my garden…. You should always start a novel with action. Well I’m sure we can all think of a hundred books that start with something other than action. Write every day. Plot everything/don’t plot everything. Write a synopsis before you start/synopses are a waste of time. There are whole books about plot and character development, what exactly a 3 rd person deep POV means and how and when to use it. You can drown in it all. The point is that you can take advice until you’re blue in the face. You can...

         It’s twenty years now since I first put together an anthology of work by my adult education students – I teach both art and creative writing. I think I was one of the first; before long, everyone was doing it. I was fortunate enough to have a graphic designer as one of my students, and he put it together.         No e-books in those days, and very few people had computers.  No print on demand; the adult education service put up the money for a 2000 print run, and we paid back every penny. We had a great DIY launch at Kingston Waterstones. The contributors came from several different classes – general fiction, poetry, and art. Those who had additional cooking skills provided food; someone else who was an interior designer did flower arrangements, and the artists did posters. We included work from tutors, which gave potential students an idea of the strengths of particular classes – and meant we had a couple well-known name...