Authors Electric

The lengths we go to to simulate working! When I was a lad, DA stood for District Attorney on US TV shows and Duck’s Arse in barber shops. (For younger readers, I should explain that a DA was the back bit of a Tony Curtis, where the hair was swept back on each side to meet in the middle of your occiput.) The reason I’m telling you all this is that the illustration represents my latest displacement activity (which I’ll now call DA to save time). We all have DAs, but the essence of a really good one is that it pretends not to be. It gives you the impression that you’re not wasting time but actually working. The best ones even manage to go a bit further – with them, you’re not only working, you’re working on whatever it is the DA is helping you to avoid. In this instance, not only have I spent a pleasant half hour creating the table represented here, I’m now spending more time explaining it to some imagined readers, which is a sort of ne plus ultra DA in that it’s not only a DA i...

Displacement activity! This is something many writers know only too well. It can take many forms but its purpose is always the same and you don’t need many guesses to know that’s to avoid writing. However, I’m not going to discuss all the forms that displacement activity takes, I want to tell you about a new one I found. I’ve talked before about MOOCS the online education courses provided by FutureLearn. Well, I enrolled in Literature in the Digital Age , which is quite interesting, even though it talks about poetry a lot. As you know, poetry is not my thing. The course could be called displacement activity but I prefer to think of it as education. But it introduced me to an analytical tool which is perfect as a displacement activity. This tool can make comparisons between anything book related that you like, and if you want to try it out it’s called Google Books Ngram Viewer . You’ll also find an information page here . Please note that the search format is word,w...

Yeast, Lasers and too many Words! I’m trying to finish a book. It has to be delivered at the end of Nov and I realised about a week ago that it wasn’t about what I thought it was. Not good. Yes, my characters will be doing roughly all the things I first thought they would but the heart of the book, the real centre is something far less dramatic than the all guns blazing sort of tale I thought I was writing. What I really want the reader to focus on is a much quieter tale about one man’s now ancient mistake and the, I suppose you’d say professional coming of age of a very young police officer. Now I’ve finally spotted this, it all makes perfect sense! – just wish I’d noticed sooner; that would have saved a whole heap of rewriting. Sometimes I get so sick of words, especially towards the end of writing a book. It feels like there’s a daily supply or a daily tolerance level over and above which I just don’t want to know. I don’t even want to read! So, displacement and replacem...