Authors Electric

I’ve never been a ‘foodie’, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘a  person  who  loves   food  and is very  interested  in different  types  of  food ’, let alone any type of gourmet or epicure. I once traumatized my closest friend in my early teens by saying I’d be happy enough to live on food pills. I had read and watched a lot of science fiction in which the shiny folk of the future (this was the 1970s and 1980s when the iconic year 2000 was still a long way off) wouldn’t waste precious leisure time cooking and would simply knock back a couple of pills to keep themselves going while conquering new worlds. ( Soylent Green hadn’t penetrated my consciousness at that point.) My friend recently reminded me of that – in her eyes – faux pas. Food had always been important to her and her family, whereas I was brought up on a typical British working-class family diet for that time: meat and two veg, always potatoes, a roast on Sunda...

‘A very famous editor once said to me: “Barry, tell them what they eat.”’ This is one of the delightful pieces of advice given by Barry Cunningham on writing for children . He doesn’t say who the famous editor is – Kaye Webb? – but I love this nugget for its apparent triviality, actually giving an extremely important message.  Food matters to children. It’s a big part of their everyday lives and if you want them to get lost in your story, better make sure you don’t let the action go on too long without feeding your characters. Yes, you can have scene breaks, but every now and then your readers will want to know what your hungry hero will be having for supper; even more so, if supper happens to be a fabulous party, or a midnight feast planned in the dorm.  Enid Blyton totally got this: remember all those picnics enjoyed by the Famous Five, or the illicit night time snacks shared by boarding school girls in Malory Towers? More recently J K Rowling...