Authors Electric

No, I don’t mean those times when you hear a recording of yourself speaking and shudder with humiliation and embarrassment, though I’ve experienced that too. (Where did that flat-vowelled squeaky-voiced twelve-year-old with a frog in her throat spring from?) And no, I’m not at all ashamed of my Yorkshire accent – just amazed that it still survives after all these years of living in many different places.       Anyway, the subject under discussion is not my speaking but my writing voice. Anyone else get those times when you can’t write ten words in succession without recoiling in disgust? You may have an exciting new novel buzzing in your head, a bunch of characters all ready to express themselves and a plot worked out, if not down to the last detail then at least with some idea of what’s happening and when. But the actual words and sentences... it’s not so much that they won’t come as that when they do they make you want to rip up the page or clobber yo...

  I have just read First Person,  Richard Flanagan's new novel about a hungry young novelist struggling with ghostwriting the life of an impossible con-man for a demanding publisher. It captures exactly the sort of despair we have all faced at times when trying to make a living in the creative world. I think perhaps texts such as this should be recommended reading on any vocational creative writing course and in every art school, (and every drama school come to that), in order to test the mettle of the would-be creatives. I remember as a teenager reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell and Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham and being both excited and appalled. Excited by the prospect of escaping an ordinary life in order to be a great poet/artist like the heroes of these books, and simultaneously appalled by the poverty and rejection that they have to face as a result of their choices.   If you can read books like these and st...

                                     Imagine this: you've spent years developing your particular brand as a writer, from a series of books...to their singular hook (e.g. Southern Scotch)...to the template for your covers. Now, just as you're gaining some traction, the devil whispers in your ear. And you want to try something different. You see a spin-off series. In fact, you've started writing it and it's coming along wonderfully. Still, each day you feel a pressing need to get down and dirty, grappling with marketing hurdles. It's time now for the dirty word. You know the one:                                    Strategy Now, I have no trouble imagining this. I'd written four Boss MacTavin mysteries--all starring that Southern Scot and sporting cool Tartan covers--when I chose to try someth...