Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. When this post appears, I should have just returned from a fabulous break in stunning Northumberland. It led me to think about how getting out and about can inspire ideas. Grab your phone, take pictures. They can be random or specific images. I’ve used photos to give me ideas for how, for example, a landscape would look for my characters. I can also use that background to visualise who might live there. You could also use your images to write non-fiction pieces (were there historical events associated with that landscape?). Photos can be great for triggering ideas. I take far more than I normally do when away so try to make use of these for writing purposes later.   I love postcards and send some home. But why not use a typically sized card to create a story? It will be flash fiction because you won’t get more than a couple of hundred words on there at most. Indeed flash has been known as postcard fiction. Writ...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I didn’t start out writing in the short fiction forms. I began by seeing if I could write a novel. I did. It went through numerous rewrites, had professional editing twice, and was longlisted in a Debut Novel competition. It remains unpublished. I became tired of the rejections  so I turned my attention to the shorter fiction forms.  It took a long time for my stories to become publishable but I wasn’t surprised. I’d been reading plenty of sensible writing advice and still do. You are warned learning to get your work up to publication standard does take time. I saw this as fair game (and again still do). I did find quickly one advantage to writing short stories was I could get far more written in the time it took me to write my novel, edited, reworked, edited again etc. I was also able to get feedback on the short stories which I used to help me improve.  That eventually led to my first story in...

  Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One image of The Hayes, Swanwick was taken by me, Allison Symes. I read short and long form fiction and non-fiction. I mix up reading in print books or on Kindle. I often try works by authors new to me on the latter. If I like the ebooks, I often buy said authors’ paperbacks later. The Kindle is especially useful for non-fiction. I also write in short and longer format, fiction and non-fiction. It keeps my reading and writing life interesting. My writing life has been an upside down one. I started by writing novels.Talk about running before I could walk. I then went into short stories. From there I went into flash fiction. During the short form time, I branched out into non-fiction by blogging, writing articles etc. It is all fun. Almost certainly I’ve done everything the wrong way around! Having said that, this means when I go to a writing event, I have a wide range of topics to interest me. It is a rare day...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One positive thing to come from the pandemic was the increasing use of Zoom to enable people to still “meet”.   I use Zoom regularly to meet with distant family members and for workshops. One welcome thing I hadn’t expected was being able to run flash fiction workshops for writing groups all over the country. No travel fees and I’m paid. I like this - a lot! I now run a monthly flash fiction workshop, on different aspects of the craft, for a Christian writing organisation. The members could never meet in person - we live hundreds of miles apart - but Zoom comes to the rescue and it has made it possible for the organisation concerned to offer genre specific writing groups. I think it is a wonderful development. Zoom has also led to my rediscovering PowerPoint . I used it a lot in the 1990s, moved away, and then returned to it for Zoom workshops as these presentations are great (and easy) to share on s...

Bury St Edmunds has just held the very first fringe literary festival - the Foreword Festival   - which took place on 7th and 8th October. Do click on the link to find out more, it was a marvellous weekend. As part of the inaugural event they held a flash fiction competition, winning stories would be read out at various locations in the town by professional actors. Never one to pass up an opportunity, especially when it is local, I decided I really MUST enter. But what do you do when a deadline is looming? You are running out of time and can't get the creative juices flowing. With the sound of a ticking clock getting louder and louder in my ear I decided to recycle a previous idea and scrolled through my old blogs searching for a suitable story I could tweak. I used to follow a lot of sites that regularly posted writing prompts, the trouble was most of my stories were under 150 words and this one had to be 500, certainly no less than 450. Eventually I found one that was 3...

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One of my favourite books on the radio is the reading of Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time . This slim novel about Richard III is often a repeated reading on Radio 4 Extra and is accompanied by The Princes in the Tower by William Walton. Well worth a listen when it comes up. What I love is it is just a straight reading of the original book. I can see the point of adaptations but I want them to keep to the spirit of the original author’s intent. I don’t want adaptations “because we can”. That’s not a strong enough reason to meddle. I loved the Peter Jackson film adaptation of The Lord of The Rings , but there is no way The Hobbit has enough in it to justify being more than one movie. Just as there should be a good reason for a story (and any character being in said tale), there should be a good reason for adapting a work.  Every so often one of my flash fiction pieces is broadcast on an internet radio ...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love reading books of letters and diaries. I was a fan of Adrian Mole and the letters of P.G. Wodehouse are an interesting and often humorous read (as you’d expect). One of my favourite quotes comes from a Wodehouse letter.   “God may have forgiven Herbert Jenkins Limited for the jacket of Meet Mr Mulliner but I never shall!” Dodgy book covers are nothing new then! I also have a fascinating collection of letters between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Reading this is like peeping in on a private world, which is a great reason to read books of letters and diaries! Have you written in letter and/or diary format? I’ve done both though for flash fiction I have needed to use close to the upper limit of 1000 words for these. They are an interesting challenge and I find they make a nice change from “straight prose”.  Having said that, I wouldn’t want to always use these formats. It can look gimmicky. Besides the...

Image Credits:- Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Photos of The Hayes, Swanwick were taken by me, Allison Symes.   I will still be at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School when this goes live. This event is my big writing event of the year. It is a joy to get together with other writers, enjoy a range of workshops, and convivial company. I come back inspired, refreshed, and tired! All that creative energy takes it out of me  but in a good way.  That made me wonder about holiday reading and writing. Do you read and/or write more or less during the summer? That answer may depend I suspect on whether you have school age children or other commitments. For me, the writing dips as I take much needed time off but the blessings of being a flash fiction writer is if I only write a couple of hundred words a day, I’ve probably completed a story in that word count. I also prepare and schedule blogs in advance including this one. I love scheduling! It means I can take ...

Way back in April when reading the Authors Electric blog I came across a post written by Joy Kluver about an introduction to crime writing workshop she attended held at the inaugural Farnham Literary Festival. https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2022/04/farnham-literary-festival-joy-kluver.html They were given the starting line ‘So, what have we got here, Barton?’ as a writing prompt and Joy was impressed by the different directions the stories took. At a loose end I made a note of the prompt and set about scribbling a piece of flash fiction. I’ve edited it, re-edited it and sent it into a few places for publication but so far it’s not found a home so I decided to share it with you. Thanks Joy for the initial inspiration, hope you like the twist at the end. “So, what have we got here, Barton?” Did he really say decapitated heads? Plural? “And headless corpses.” He consulted his notebook, “with assorted limbs scattered throughout.” My breakfast rose ominously in my throat. A...

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love writing workshops. I’ve learned so much from them and now I’m running my own (flash fiction, the ups and downs of being a writer etc). I like workshops which give me plenty to think about and  exercises I can polish up at home. I want to be “doing” as well as listening. Knowing what I like has helped me tailor my workshops. I think good old-fashioned pen and paper still has a valuable role to play. This shows up best at a writing workshop. No worries about whether your PC battery will die halfway through the workshop. No worries about whether there will be enough charging points for said PC to avoid that. You just pick up a pen and jot down points of interest. Okay, there is a dilemma to be faced with pen and paper. Just which notebook will I use? Which pen to go with it? Is there any writer who doesn’t have a surfeit of notebooks and pens? When I worked in Winchester many moons ago, I avoided going...