Authors Electric

What do you do when you finish a book? When the final edit has gone to the publisher, or you’ve pressed the publish button and it’s live on Kindle do you take a break, or immediately start to write the next one? Some writers take time off to recuperate, or to plan, or research their next novel. Lee Childs famously starts to write each Jack Reacher book on September 1 st , the anniversary of being made redundant, and aims to finish in six months, leaving the rest of the year free. For Susanna Clarke there were sixteen years between her debut, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Piranisi which was published in 2020. Years she spent planning and writing. Lee Childs never plans. He simply sits down and starts writing. Other writers, especially those writing historical fiction, use the time to research the background for their next novel. As for me, much as I like the idea of taking time off, I find that it never works out that way. It is as if the stories are lining up waiting to be told...

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...