Authors Electric

 A warning to those of a squeamish disposition – a fair amount of this deals with the vagaries of the alimentary canal…   I wonder whether, like me, you get most of your present-day information these days from Casualty and similar programmes? Where no member of staff has a trouble-free relationship, and they routinely find themselves involved in/with car crashes/fires/explosions or psychopaths. Or else they’re addicted to alcohol, gambling or prescription meds. And what of writing medical dramas in the past? I can remember the days when I was told to shut up and not to make a fuss in the last stages of labour, and you needed your husband’s signature to have an intrauterine device fitted. When consultants ignored you and just talked rather condescendingly to the nurse. When my mother simply didn’t believe that my female Polish relatives could be proper doctors. Call the Midwife seems a bit cosy, really. I never saw the same one twice, and always had to wait for hours to see...

Wikipedia  I was talking to an old friend of mine recently about something I’d read; children who have been lied to assume that everyone lies, and therefore have no compunction about doing it themselves. But if you delve into this a little more deeply, it becomes very interesting and relevant to what we write for children. Both about lying, and telling the truth. My children found the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons much funnier than I did. Calvin is a six-year-old boy and Hobbes is his stuffed toy tiger, whom he addresses as a sentient being although all the other characters treat him as a toy. Calvin has a vivid imagination, and comes out with some great one-liners such as : “Reality continues to ruin my life.” But it’s the stories his father tells him that made the impact on me. He makes up ludicrous explanations to some of Calvin's awkward questions such as where do babies come from: “You can buy assembly kits at Sears and K Mart.” Or how the load limit for bridges is calcul...

 Hedgehogs are part of British culture, and are so distinctive that they have figured in our literature for a long time. They are in serious decline in the UK these days, thanks to road kill and pesticides, so I was thrilled when I set up the camera trap to see if foxes were digging up our Jerusalem artichokes and discovered a hedgehog bustling past instead. The artichokes are fine, by the way, just a bit slow to emerge, and are now three foot tall. Since then we reckon we have spotted five different individuals, thanks to Brambles Crunchy Hedgehog Food , which is very popular, and makes their munching audible halfway down the garden when they arrive for their breakfast – 21.30 at the moment. Bread and milk, the traditional offering, is very bad for them, and cat biscuits make another acceptable and safe alternative. They are incredibly entertaining, as they have no compunction about shoving competitors for their lady friends out of the way, and have very noisy and lengthy wooing s...

When I started my MA, many years ago, I was asked who I would like to be able to write like. I didn’t want to be able to write like anyone else, I wanted to write like me. There wasn’t anyone else who sounded the way I wanted to sound (I was writing for radio at the time). Until now. Sally Wainwright, the author of Happy Valley, hits the spot. She combines heavy drama with social commentary, fantastic characterisation, superb plotting and the touches of humour which make her work so memorable. Make ‘em cry, then make ‘em laugh. If you can elicit a physical reaction your viewer or reader will remember it, as it’s a memory substantiated by more than looking and listening.  Contrast is everything. The main character, the supremely tough and capable Sergeant Catherine Cawood, is brilliantly played by Sarah Lancashire. She tries to stop someone setting fire to himself by introducing herself to both him and us as follows: “I'm Catherine, by the way. I'm forty-seven. I'm divorce...

The further from reality something is, the less scary it becomes. Daleks are so obviously a creation of an effects department that physically they are not terribly frightening – it’s when they speak that all this changes. Although their voices are mechanical and emotionless the fact that they have voices at all suggests thought processes equally different from our own, but not so alien that they are beyond our comprehension. This may be why extra-terrestrials have so frequently been depicted as having an adapted human form – Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars , and the Vogons in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy both have vaguely human body plans, so that we can imagine their emotions from the expressions on their toad-like faces. The closer something is to something we know, the more disturbing slight changes become. In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline , Coraline’s mother has been replaced by a mother with boot-button eyes, but she is otherwise the same, although her character is very different. Fi...

  Venezuela As this is a difficult post to illustrate, I am using a couple of photos of husband Bob asleep at airports around the world.   Dreams are two-edged swords. Inexperienced writers frequently use them as a substitute for reality, so that they can write in a surrealist way, drop in a plot clue, and get away with it. Ending a story with the line it was all a dream is the biggest cop-out of the lot. Dreams aren’t really like reality at all.   Lucid dreams are dreams when you realise you are dreaming, and can actually make decisions about the direction the action will take, and if you’ve ever had one they can give you a real insight into what dreaming is like. There are ways of testing whether you’re asleep, as well. Electricity doesn’t work in a predictable way, and turning on a light won’t work. Most dreams are predominantly visual, with a bit of sound thrown in, and the occasional sensation. It is very unusual to smell something in a dream, or to taste anythi...

Rain, heavy cloud, mud, Omicron... So this is a picture post of happy memories connected with writing. This one is of my wonderful agent, Carolyn Whitaker, on the balcony of her house in Turkey, which I visited many times. We also went to Iceland together. She died in 2016, and I miss her more than I can say. A generous, funny, adventurous woman with the most incisive and down-to-earth mind I have ever encountered when it came to editing a manuscript. "Let's start with the first f--- on page thirteen." She had a speedboat at her place in Netley, and piloted it at terrifying speeds. She also owned racehorses, and I was there when she had a winner at Epsom. A total original, who was an enormous influence on me. I was very touched when she left me some money; I realised it was exactly the same amount she had earned off me in the previous twenty-five years.    This is a humming bird from the garden in Monteverde, Costa Rica, which was the initial setting for my fantasy The Di...

 Every so often one of those situations arises when you’re not quite sure whether you have slipped into an alternative dimension, as there is something not quite right about everything. It can be something to exploit, and extrapolation can lead you down all sorts of weird and wonderful pathways. Yesterday it was Walkies at RHS Wisley day. We were warned as we entered, because dogs are normally strictly forbidden. There were possibly hundreds of dogs there, in different parts of the grounds, all on leads. I have never seen such well-behaved canines in my life. It was uncanny, I never heard a single bark all afternoon. No dog was reprimanded for anything, no legs were lifted, none of them were pulling at their leads or trying it on with other dogs. There was every conceivable breed and every conceivable colour, size or shape. After a while my mind started to drift, and I wondered whether the dogs were, in fact, taking their owners for a walk. That positions had been reversed by some ...

 As our worlds have shrunk during the pandemic, the new experiences on which I rely for material is dwindling. The sight of a kingfisher on the river I now know like my back garden, an altercastion in Lidl, hunting down parasol mushrooms on the common, collecting sweet chestnuts from the downs. Biggest parasol mushroom this year All within walking distance, all things I have experienced before. Lidl doesn't change much, other than the designs on the face masks, and the altercations over trolleys - but the common does, the trees are going from green to gold and then to bare branches. Foraging has become more important as anything you can get that avoids the shops is a good idea. It was an excellent blackberry season; fortunately, I still have several tubs of them in the freezer. I made elderflower chanpagne this summer, but that didn't last very long... It's been a good year for sweet chestnuts, too, and they make a great snack whilst watching re-runs of things you last saw ...

Some characters seem to spring out of thin air, but others have a starting point with a real person. Eccentric people provide the best material – they’re more interesting, their reactions are more exaggerated, they often have a hobby or obsession that informs everything they do. Because of this warts-and-all element, you are unlikely to provide the most flattering of portrayals, and so a name-change is needed. You can, of course, go a lot further, and alter the age, gender and appearance as well. However, the person you know better than anyone else is, of course, yourself - so you use aspects of yourself quite a lot as well. I also think there’s a lot of acting in writing. I imagine myself as my characters, and try to see things from their point of view. This can suddenly give you a completely new insight into someone you thought you knew extremely well. It’s also true that when you know someone very well you tend to assume that the reader knows what they look like too, and it’s eas...